WHAT IS VIVISECTION?
Vivisection is the cruel and outdated practice of scientifically unvalidated animal testing.
Vivisection and dissection have more in common than just a root word: Almost all of the animals used in cruel experiments are killed, after a long period of immense suffering, and are then dissected.
At any given moment, millions upon millions of rats, mice, rabbits, primates, cats, dogs, and other animals are locked inside barren cages in laboratories across the world.
They’re not only suffering the psychological distress of being locked up in cages, but also the severe pain and discomfort from the cruellest of procedures performed upon them. Poisoning, shocking, burning, drowning, cutting, organ harvesting and killing animals is all in a day’s work for the vivisector. The law exempts abuse of animals in laboratories, and vivisectors are given a pass to get away with severe animal neglect, cruelty and murder.
Vivisection in the past may be viewed as a dark period in history. Where humans with very little knowledge or technologies, performed cruel testing, believing it to be for scientific learning. However, in modern times there is no need or justification for such cruelty. The science is hugely flawed, and testing on animals is not only cruel, it holds back medical progress and fails when transferred to humans.
Vivisection has become a horrific trade, generating false claims, a false sense of safety for humans, and huge profits for the vivisectors and those that breed the animals that are born to suffer, and to become ‘products’ in which their tiny bodies are sold in the name of vivisection. The most barbaric and outdated practice that is regulated across the world, and still holds back human progress.
ANIMAL TESTING STATISTICS 2022
2,761,204
*procedures carried out on animals
1,512,210
*experimental procedures (55%)
1,248,994
*creation and breeding of genetically modified animals (45%)
2,685,610
*number of animals used
WHAT IS A PROCEDURE?
Any procedure applied to an animal for an experimental or other "scientific" purpose, or for an "educational" purpose, that causes an animal pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm.
HOW MANY ANIMALS WERE USED?
The number of procedures carried out in a year does not equal the number of animals that have been used in procedures. This is because some animals may be re-used in different experiments, prolonging their suffering.
These instances are counted as separate, additional procedures. As a result, the number of procedures is usually higher than the number of animals used.
2,685,610 animals were used in "research" in 2022.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT LEVELS OF SEVERITY?
Mild: The oral gavage of beagles for the pharmaceutical industry, which involves passing a tube directly into the stomach of these poor animals up to three times a day for up to 90 days with no anaesthetic is classed by the Home Office as a "mild" procedure.
Moderate: The transplantation of a pig's kidney into a monkey, followed by months of suffering is classed as a "moderate" procedure.
Severe: Causing a bacterial brain inflammation in animals, which causes extreme suffering, which will lead to the death of some animals during the experiment is classed as a "severe" procedure.
Non-recovery: A sepsis "study" where an animal endures a surgical procedure under anaesthetic which involves making a hole in their intestine so that the contents of their stomach leak into the body cavity and have a toxic effect. The bodies infection-fighting process turns on itself, causing organ failure. Sepsis may progress to “septic shock”. This is a dramatic drop in blood pressure that can damage the lungs, kidneys, liver and other organs. This is classed as "non-recovery" by the Home Office.
ANIMAL TESTING FAILURE RATE
The failure rate of animal testing, or the inaccuracy of animal models in predicting human responses, has been a subject of debate and concern in the scientific and ethical communities. Here are some key points to consider:
Limited Predictive Value
Studies and analyses have shown that animal models do not accurately predict human responses to drugs and diseases. The reasons for this lack of predictive value are multifaceted and can include differences in biology, genetics, metabolism, and the specific conditions being studied.
High Failure Rates in Drug Development
It's often cited that a significant portion of new drugs that show promise in animal testing fail during clinical trials in humans. Recent analysis suggests that, despite efforts to improve the predictability of animal testing, the failure rate has actually increased and is now closer to 96% which leads to only a small percentage of drugs ultimately receiving regulatory approval. The main causes of failure are lack of effectiveness and safety problems that were not predicted by animal tests. If we look only at the safety data (and ignore the efficacy), we get a failure rate of around 50%.
Ethical and Welfare Concerns
Aside from concerns about predictive accuracy, animal testing also raises ethical questions about the treatment of animals and their welfare during experiments.
Advancements in Replacement Methods
There has been a growing effort to develop and use replacement testing methods that do not rely on animals, such as in vitro cell-based assays, computer modeling, and human tissue cultures. These methods aim to provide more relevant and accurate information about human responses.
But whilst it's true that the pharmaceutical industry will test their new drug using replacement methods to animals. They may choose to use or to ignore these replacements, especially if they flag up more adverse drug reactions than some of the older, less predictive non animal methods. In other words, if these replacements are not good for business, then they will be ignored.
The latest strategy of the industry is to tell the public that these non animal methods are not quite ready to replace animal tests. You can get away with these lies if you are talking to the general public and to most politicians, but not if you are talking to well informed people like other scientists and luckily for us, we have Dr Andre Menache on board who has been fighting against this misinformation for decades.
It does not take a genius to realise that the choice today is between a 90% failure rate using animal tests and a 90% success rate using human organs on chips and similar human based technologies.
You may get told that organs on chips do not represent the complexity of the whole living organism. While that is true, the predictive value for evaluating human outcome of new drugs using human organs on a chip is human relevant whilst using animals as a model for human diseases is not.
"Incomplete" human data which is human relevant Vs "Complete" animal data which is not human relevant. The choice is obvious is it not?
ANIMAL TESTING HAS NEVER BEEN SCIENTIFICALLY VALIDATED!
Even after several decades of human drug development, there remains a lack of published, substantial, comprehensive data to validate the use of animals in preclinical drug testing, and to point to their predictive nature with regard to human safety and efficacy.
As the absence of toxicity in animals is the critical factor for the progression of a new drug into clinical trials, this has extremely important implications for drug development and safety. If a drug appears safe in animals, it could very well still be toxic in humans. Thus, any claim that animal safety tests do a “good job” of predicting drug safety profiles, is without foundation. e.g we wouldn't be eating chocolate if it was tested in dogs.
Millions of animals are used in drug testing every year around the world, which can entail severe suffering, pain and death, which most people oppose, regardless of human benefit. Suffering in animal drug testing is often severe and prolonged: animals used in chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, for instance, receive the test substance at high doses, daily, seven days a week, for two years with no recovery periods.
If animal testing of proposed new human drugs is not sufficiently predictive of human safety—or, as we argue at least in some respects, not predictive at all—then there is significant human suffering, pain and death, too, as science and drug development are not serving human drug users and sick people who are depending on the best science being conducted to develop much needed new drugs that are safe and effective. Drugs appearing to have no serious toxicity may go on to cause human harm either in clinical trials or, even worse, if they pass through clinical trials involving relatively limited numbers of people, are of limited duration and involve limited lifestyle circumstances and factors, and make it to market where they reach millions of users and may have to be withdrawn when their toxicity to humans is recognised.
It is also acknowledged that drugs appearing to have serious toxicity in animal tests will not proceed to human trials, so drugs that may have been safe and effective in humans will have been lost.
While replacements to animal testing must go through a vigorous validation process before they can be marketed, this was not the case for animal testing. Rather, they were implemented in response to an observed harm (to humans) and their use was seen as alleviating that harm. Although we now know this isn't entirely true.
