This is similar to last month’s “Stop UK Lab's Puppy and Kitten Experiments!” but with an added sickening twist.
An article in The Times last month reported that 3,000 dogs and several million mice were used in medical research last year. A thousand of the dogs came from the Harland Beagle Facility, near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. They were sent to labs around the country mainly for use in pharmaceutical safety testing by companies such as Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Huntingdon Life Sciences and Covance. In the past, the dogs have helped in the development of the rabies vaccine, defibrillators and insulin. It is not hard to imagine what these animals from the age of just three weeks have to endure in their very short lives - and then they are killed.
As if this isn’t sickening enough, at the Harland Beagle Facility “one after another, the Beagles are asked to sit, stand and offer their forelimb. Then they move to the more advanced training offering up their jugular – so they can get used to having blood taken; sitting still with a mask on their face – so they can receive medication ; allowing clippers to be run over their neck – in case they need to be shaved. When this training is complete, they will be ready to be sent out for medical experimentation.”
Such “training” and animal experimentation is not only exceedingly cruel but barbaric and totally antiquated and unacceptable in a civilized society. Science is all about advancement and the discovery of new and better ways. The results from animal tests cannot just simply be extrapolated to humans. There are now many more reliable and humane ways of performing tests for vaccines, drugs, cosmetics, cleaning agents, medications and devices which are readily available. These include computer simulators that accurately mimic human anatomy and physiology, cell culture techniques and bacterial analysis.
No animal should be bred just to be tortured and killed. At the very least they could be adopted out to loving homes rather than given lethal injections if they haven’t already died during experimentation. Please sign the petition to demand an end to the breeding of and experimentation on animals.
