Experimenters force-feed chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires in their brains, crush their spines, and much more. Think of what it would be like to endure this and then be dumped back into a cage, usually without any painkillers.
Video footage from inside laboratories shows that animals cower in fear every time someone walks by their cages. They don't know if they will be dragged from their prison cells for an injection, blood withdrawal, a painful procedure or surgery, or death. Often animals see other animals killed right in front of them.
Most people believe that experiments on animals are necessary for medicine and science to progress.
This is not the case! The belief that we must experiment on animals is being challenged by a growing number of physicians and scientists who are utilizing many research methods that do not harm or kill animals. Physicians and scientists also see the negative consequences of using one species to provide information about another species; often the results of animal experiments are misleading or even harmful to humans.
Increasing numbers of scientists and clinicians are challenging animal experimentation on scientific grounds. (1-3) Considerable evidence demonstrates that animal experimentation is inefficient and unreliable, while newly developed methodologies are more valid and less expensive than animal studies.
Vivisection is self-perpetuating. Scientists' salaries and professional status are often tied to grants, and a critical element of success in grant applications is proof of prior experience and expertise.
Vivisection is lucrative. It’s traditionally respected place in modern medicine results in secure financial support, which is often an integral component of a university's budget. Many medical centers receive tens of millions of dollars annually in direct grants for animal research, and tens of millions more for overhead costs that are supposedly related to that research. Since these medical centers depend on this overhead for much of their administrative costs, construction, and building maintenance, they perpetuate vivisection by praising it in the media and to legislators.
Animal researchers' ethical defense of the practice has been superficial and self-serving.
The general public, which cares about animal welfare, has been led to believe that animals rarely suffer in laboratories. Animal researchers often cite U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics (derived from researchers themselves) that only 6 to 8 percent of animals used in vivisection experience pain unrelieved by anesthesia or analgesia.(174)
Evidence indicates, however, that many animal researchers fail to acknowledge - or even perceive - animal pain and suffering.
The tens of millions of animals used and killed each year in American laboratories generally suffer enormously, often from fear and physical pain, nearly always from the deprivation inflicted by their confinement, which denies their most basic psychological and physical needs.
Conclusion
The value of animal experimentation has been grossly exaggerated by those with a vested economic interest in its preservation. Because animal experimentation focuses on artificially created pathology, involves confounding variables, and is undermined by differences in human and nonhuman anatomy, physiology, and pathology, it is an inherently unsound method to investigate human disease processes. Billions of dollars invested annually in animal research would be put to much more efficient, effective, and humane use if redirected to clinical and epidemiological research and public health programs.
Original source:
'The Absurdity of Vivisection' http://vivisection-absurd.org.uk/menu.htmlSources:
The Vivisection Industry http://www.health.org.nz/vivind.html
LCA Vivisection Campaign http://www.lcanimal.org/cmpgn/cmpgn_016.htm American Anti-Vivisection Society http://www.aavs.org/home.htmlVivisection is Scientific Fraud - We are all Victims http://www.bava.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/LET’S PUT AN END TO THIS SENSELESS TORTURE ONCE AND FOR ALL!
“I abhor vivisection. It should at least be curbed. Better, it should be abolished. I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty. The whole thing is evil.” -Dr. Charles Mayo, founder of the Mayo Clinic