DON'T LET ME DIE FOR YOUR LAUNDRY DETERGENT

Unfortunately in the United States many of the most common household products continue to be tested on animals. The ways that animals are used in experiments is truly unthinkable. In product testing corrosive substances are smeared on their skin or into their eyes and toxic products are forced down their throats or inhaled. In some experiments animals are impregnated to test the effects of these poisons in utero on their babies. Medical and psychological "research" can involve electrical shocks, radiation, burns, surgeries or mutilations. There are almost no limits on the experiments that animals endure in laboratories. One example of a common experiment is the measure of an animal's response to stimulation. To do this, the animal is put in restraints and their body opened up to expose the brain or heart where a telemetry device is implanted. The animal is then subjected to a trauma, drug, product or other stimulation. Things that are done to animals in laboratories can go as far as the sick imaginations of researchers will take them. All this suffering is not necessary. Animal testing is costly and diverts much needed funds that could go to alternative methods. As a research method there are numerous problems with animal experimentation. The volume of animals needed makes animal-based experiments expensive and cumbersome. Getting the same results reproduced in different labs can be a challenge. These tests depend on researcher evaluation which can be very subjective and results from these tests can be skewed by variations which naturally exist between individual animals. This is no minor drawback—the ability to replicate results of a study is a fundamental hallmark of good research. Another problem with animal-based experiments is that the results often do not apply to humans. Many of the most commonly studied human diseases do not naturally occur in animals, so they must be induced. These diseases include many types of cancer, heart disease and HIV. In fact it is estimated that less than 2% of human illness is ever seen in animals. Making a healthy animal artificially sick to test illness that occurs in humans can thwart medical progress. In many cases animals do not develop illness in the same ways that humans do. For example, early research on polio transmission used primates who transmit the disease differently than humans. Using primates as a model delayed understanding of its transmission in humans. This misstep was only disproven when researchers turned their focus back to humans, by studying tissue from fatal cases of polio in people.

Likewise when chimpanzees were first infected with HIV, the theory was that since they are so close to us genetically, we could infect them and understand the progression of the virus in humans. That did not happen. After many animals were tortured in these experiments, researchers learned that HIV did not develop into AIDS in chimpanzees. Had the resources been applied to studying humans already infected, progress would have come quicker and lives, both human and non-human, might have been saved. Time after time we have seen that the great physiological variations between species make it dangerous to try to apply results from these experiments to humans. There are countless examples of drugs determined to be safe when tested on animals which are harmful to humans. One in seven people is in the hospital today as a result of an adverse reaction to prescriptions that were safe in laboratory tests on animals; 106,000 people die from these drugs every year. Given what we know about the limitations of animal-based models, why do we still subject animals to such cruel experiments? Resistance to alternative testing techniques often comes from those with a financial stake in the business including animal importers, breeders and dealers, equipment and cage manufacturers, feed producers, and drug companies. Lack of government regulation can be traced to special interest groups funded by pharmaceutical companies. These groups lobby politicians to expand funding for animal experimentation and fight industry regulation. But public outcry against these barbaric experiments is growing. More and more researchers are looking to methods which do not involve animals.Many of the most significant advances in research in the last decade have come as the result of experiments that do not involve exploiting animals. There is no excuse for animals to continue suffering in laboratories when there are great alternatives that can.

(This information is from Beagle Freedom Project who rescue these animals and give them a chance for life after laboratories)