Essay, Research Paper: Vivisection And Its Contribution To Environmental Pollution

We, as Americans, tend to think of ourselves as fairly civilized. After all, we re the greatest country in the world, right? We ve got the best economy in the world. Things are looking up, the country s headed in the right direction, and political correctness is in full swing. Why, then, do so many of us turn a blind eye to one of the most savage, inhuman practices known to man, which goes on day in and day out not only in the U.S. but all around the world?
I speak, as you may have guessed from the cover page of this report, of vivisection. Animal testing. It s happening all around us, maybe not in our own backyards, maybe not even in the same county we live in, but it s there, it s real, and, if you ask me, it s barbaric.
Before I begin, let me tell you what you will and will not find in this report. First off, there will be no sugar coating. There is a reason I put a warning on my cover page, and that is that I will not be pulling any punches. You will see many pictures of animals and the cruelty they endure in vivisection labs; my purpose is not to glorify these actions, but to show the unbelievable disregard for a living being s suffering that takes place daily. Secondly, although the opinions I express in this report are very strong, be assured that I am in no way trying to force these beliefs on anyone; I am simply laying forth the information. Do with it as you will.
First, it seems appropriate to explain what vivisection itself is. If you want the dictionary meaning of it, look to the upper right of this page. In more general terms, vivisection is the name given to most any kind of animal experimentation. As the definition implies, the animals being subjected to this treatment are still alive and are not given any form of anesthesia.
They are poked, prodded, electrocuted, cut open with saws, knives, and scalpels. They are dropped from varying heights, to observe the effects for scientific purposes. The list goes on and on; there are endless ways to torture an animal that can be excused as research. Basically, if you see a label on a product that reads Tested safe on animals or something to that effect, it may as well say, many small animals were put through hell so we can legally sell this product. Even that is not the whole truth, but I ll get into that later.
Now that you have been acquainted with the what of vivisection, we ll move on to the why. Obviously, there is a very simple explanation for why all this atrocity goes on: progress, scientific research, the safety of humankind. That would be all well and good. However, the findings attriuted to animal testing are, for lack of a better word, crap: political maneuvering, smokescreens, snowjobs. Call it what you will, it all boils down to this: animal testing is one of the biggest lies in the world today.
Of course, it would be totally asinine to make such a broad statement without a good deal of evidence to back it up. Fortunately, I m prepared to deliver.
First, let s look at the alleged purpose of animal testing: improvement of life and conditions for the human animal, at the expense of non-human animals. That, in itself, wouldn t be such a bad thing if tests results from vivisection labs actually proved anything. What do I mean by that?
Well, put simply, if a scientist injects Chemical A into a rat, and the rat dies, is it a great scientific benefit to mankind? Has anything been proven? No. A rat has been killed, and that s the end of the matter. A human and a rat have sufficiently different biological structures that they can have totally different responses to a given substance. The same holds true for a human and a monkey, a human and a cat, or even a rat and a mouse, two species which are more closely linked than a human is with anything.
It s this simple fact that accounts for a large percentage of the falsehood in findings attributed to animal research. Nothing can be proven by exposing different kinds of non-human animals to allegedly toxic substances, besides that the one specific animal being exposed may have a certain reaction to it. For example, if you give parsley to a parrot, it will die. From this, we can conclude that parsley is a poisonous substance.
Obviously, that s quite a ridiculous conclusion, as we all know parsley, though it may not do well for a parrot, is completely safe for human ingestion. That s simple to see. The thing is, test results drawn from vivisection have about as much to do with reality as our poisonous parsley theory. The point being, the fact that a particular substance causes a certain reaction in one species has little or nothing to do with what effect it has on another species. Yet, vivisection is based entirely results that are, in effect, exactly the same thing. A few more simple demonstrations of the varied workings of different species:
-Penicillin is poisonous to guinea pigs.
-Sheep can tolerate a considerable amount of arsenic.
-Aspirin is toxic to cats.
-One hundred milligrams of scopolamine leave dogs and cats completely unaffected, while it takes only 5 milligrams to kill a human.
-Hemlock is eaten, and enjoyed greatly, by goats, sheep, and horses.
Don t get me wrong; I m not saying animal tests are completely bogus and prove nothing at all. What I am saying is that the chance that findings obtained from an animal will hold the same for humans is a crapshoot at best. Do you want research on cancer or the AIDS virus being conducted in a matter that rarely, if ever, produces any concrete evidence?
So, what does this mean? How does it relate to the great lie of animal testing? Well, it can mean one of two things. The first being that scientists are na ve enough to believe that test results performed on two entirely different platforms somehow relate to each other. This may be true of some, but how many of these people who have countless years of schooling could you realistically believe to buy into something that even I, with no scientific background whatsoever, know to be false?
This brings us to the second option, the darker side of vivisection: the manipulation of test results to benefit the individual or company who is funding the test. The sad truth is, a great deal of research done with animal test subjects falls under this category. Am I saying that a great deal of scientists, and the companies that employ them, are not only corrupt, but unconcerned with the actual effects their safe products may be having on the environment? In a word, yes.
Exactly what kind of statistical manipulation goes on? You name it, it s probably happening. Animal testing can be used and abused to represent basically whatever the company funding the test wants it to. Want to prove that a substance is harmless? Get a group of animals of different species, inject them all with it, and find one type that isn't harmed by it. Publish only the results from that particular test, and voila, you ve proved that your substance is harmless. Of course, this principle can be applied inversely to prove that a substance is also harmful.
The applications for this particular type of manipulation are varied. The same process could also be used to convince an otherwise disagreeable community to allow the building of an undesirable facility in their area a few tests here, a few dead animals there, and we can conclude that the proposed toxic-waste dump would be perfectly suitable for human habitation. (Maybe that s a bit of an extreme example, but you get the picture.)
Seems pretty pathetic, doesn t it? So many scientists are actually nothing more than highly educated, extremely glorified spin doctors. Of course, they re making great money, and the companies are getting the test results that they want, so nobody s complaining.
By now I m sure you re wondering exactly what kind of testing goes on behind the closed doors of vivisection labs. Well, I don t have the time or space to go into explicit detail about every single method and instrument, but I will take the time to discuss some of the more common ones.
First, we have the Lethal Dose, or LD tests. The aim of these is to determine what quantity of a particular drug, chemical, or household cleaner is needed to kill off a set portion of a group of test animals. The target percentage of deaths is denoted by a number attached to the LD. For example, the LD-50 test aims to kill 50 percent of the animals being used. The animals used for these tests are usually rats and mice, most of which go through extreme pain and anguish during the course of the testing. Not only are the circumstances and results of the tests quite ridiculous, but, as with all animal test results, there is little or no correlation between animal and human findings.
A test of this kind was used to determine that saccharin be regulated in California (as per Proposition 65.) The evidence supporting this regulation? Male rats, given doses of saccharin equivalent to drinking 800 to 1,000 cans of soda per day for an entire lifetime, developed cancer of the bladder. In fact, all animal tests for cancer-causing substances are universally unreliable. Of 19 known human oral carcinogens, only 7 caused cancer in animals.
Hard to believe? It shouldn t be. The United States EPA regularly conducts similar tests to determine that hazards of household cleaners, sweeteners, etc. The problem is that the doses used are more than a million times stronger than the ones a human would come into contact with from normal use of said products.
Another common test is the Draize eye irritancy test, in which rabbits have irritant substances applied to their eyes without the benefit of anesthesia. It is used to determine the possible toxicity of substances, including makeup. The problem, as you may have already guessed, is that the results are not accurate. Rabbits and humans not only differ in cornea and eyelid structure, but also in their ability to produce tears. In the case of both of the above types of tests, in vitro testing proves not only cheaper, but also more accurate.
Next, we have the machines, devices, and other such contraptions used in the testing of animals. Call them what you will, they re no more than glorified instruments of torture. The most common piece of laboratory equipment is the Noble-Collip Drum, a machine that for all intents and purposes is not much different than a tumble-dryer. It was invented by R.L. Noble and B.J. Collip, and is used for shock experiments. (That s system shock, not electric shock.)
The device rolls the animal around in a revolving drum containing two triangular projections. The animal will be caught by one of the projections and carried up the side of the machine, where it will be allowed to fall. It is then picked up by the other projection, and the process repeats. Of course, the animal cannot be allowed any capacity for breaking the fall, so its paws are taped together. The drum rotates forty times per minute, with the animal falling twice per rotation. In a ten minutes time, the test animal will be victim to roughly eight hundred falls. Common injuries resulting from this study include broken teeth, concussion, bruising of the liver, hemorrhaging from the mouth and anus, engorgement of bowels, kidneys, and lungs, and ulcers of the stomach and intestines. Even though the drum was condemned as inhumane as early as 1939, it continues to be the most popular method of traumatizing animals in the name of science. (What this machine proves beyond the fact that dropping animals over and over can damage them severely is beyond me.)
Though the drum may be the most common trauma-producing device, it is far from the only one. There are restraining chairs and racks for monkeys, cats, and dogs. The animals are held immobile for months on end, while other, even more stressful experiments are performed on them. There is a wide range of devices used to beat animals with hammers, crush them with clamps, subject them to electric shocks, or extreme temperatures. And more instruments are invented daily to meet the research needs of scientists. Aerospace Medicine magazine advertised a breakthrough in the form of an innovative high-speed trauma machine capable of striking all random surfaces of a dog s hind legs at a rate of 225 blows per minute. Forget the better mousetrap, in today s world what we need is a better dog-beater!
Most of the system-shock experiments are performed, ostensibly, to aid in the field of psychological studies. The argument is that their motivation is the general good of mankind. On the other side of the coin, however, an ever-increasing amount of experimental work is for the opposite purpose: using animals as test subjects for weapons, so that human beings themselves may be killed more efficiently.
For instance, experiments on animals conducted at Porton Down Trauma Unit in Sussex, England are performed almost exclusively to aid the military in new discovering new and improved methods for taking human life. Monkeys, dogs, sheep, steers, and pigs are shot, primarily but not exclusively in the head, to test the damage capability of various types of bullets and explosive devices. Animals are subjected to lethal doses of radiation, and then forced to literally run themselves to death in rotary drums charged with electric shocks. This can take anywhere from a few hours to a matter of days. As horrible as the normal experiments are, their perpetrators may at least try to explain them away as beneficial to mankind. How they justify feeding animals to the war machine I ll never know.
Speaking of justification, or lack thereof, this brings me to the next category of tests: the ones that appear to be nothing but a cruel joke. I feel that I m being optimistic in hoping that they are at least done out of simple greed, perhaps in order to meet a quota of research necessary to maintain funding. It s better than the alternative of admitting to myself that they re done simply for fun, to watch a living being suffer, for some warped scientist s amusement.
For example, in 1962, scientists at the University of Oklahoma decided to study the effects of LSD on a male elephant named Tusko. They wanted to see if LSD induces musth, a condition of rage in which elephants become violent and uncontrollable. The dose given was calculated proportionally from the amount needed to put cats into frenzy.
When Tusko received the injection, he immediately began trumpeting, and became unable to maintain his balance. His mate did her best to support him, but he soon collapsed and went into convulsions. Within two hours he was dead. The conclusion? Elephants are particularly sensitive to LSD. What scientific value this has is anyone s guess, as it would be interesting to know the relation between the effects of LSD on a human and an elephant, considering they re obviously quite different. Of course, that s disregarding the question of how an elephant would ingest LSD on its own in the first place.
Why is this allowed to continue? How can such a great county as our own allow something such as this to go on? That s an answer I don t have, though I assume it has to do with the fact that vivisection has been around so long, and so few people know the truth behind it. The argument that we need animal testing for our own good is completely unfounded. Not only does vivisection prove nothing, it may even contribute negatively to our health.
How, you ask, is that possible? Even though the harming of animals may be barbaric, unnecessary, and revolting, how can it actually harm us? The answer lies in the fact that findings based on human data have been ignored because animal testing did not back them up. For example, by 1963 retrospective studies of human patients had already shown the connection between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. However, almost all efforts to emulate these findings, and produce lung cancer in test animals, were failures. Clarence Little, a leading researcher in animal cancer, wrote, The failure of many investigators to induce experimental cancers, except in a handful of cases, during fifty years of trying, casts serious doubt on the validity of the cigarette-lung cancer theory. The end result was that since the human and animal data did not agree, researchers distrusted the human data. This, in a nutshell, is why vivisection does not work.
Another example is in order. By the early 1940 s, human clinical research strongly indicated that asbestos caused cancer. Unfortunately, since animal studies did not back up this evidence, proper workplace safety measures were not introduced for decades after they could have been.
Of course, both those examples are quite dated. Human data may no longer be considered secondary to animal data, but intentional ignorance of more viable alternatives to vivisection still exists. The following was extracted from a USENET posting in
rec.pets.dogs.misc dated 1/24/97.
"At the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, part of the first-year curriculum includes two "dog labs." In the first lab, you open the chest of the dog with a cast saw, then observe the beating heart, then remove the heart. In the second lab, you give your dog increasing doses of an unknown drug until you identify the drug from the way the dog is reacting, or else your dog dies of an overdose first. The purported purpose is to teach basic principles of cardiology and pharmacology. This is NOT about perfecting life saving operational techniques or about testing breakthrough drugs! The dogs used are purchased from San Diego Animal Control.
Though the labs are technically "optional," students are heavily pressured to do the labs, and no mention is made of alternatives that exist, such as videos, CD-ROM, watching a human surgery at a hospital, etc. No such alternatives are sanctioned by the faculty. There is a growing movement among some of the students that the labs should be modified--either in the development of an officially sanctioned non-killing alternative, in the combining of the two labs so that the number of dogs used is reduced, or to abolish the labs altogether. Currently, very few schools include such labs as part of the curricula."
This is simply a microcosm of the mindset of vivisection supporters. More viable alternatives exist, which as I have mentioned are not only cheaper but more accurate, not to mention the fact that they involve the deaths of ZERO animals. Drugs can be developed through computer modeling or human cell cultures. Chromatography can be used to separate drugs at the molecular level and identify their properties. Mechanical models and simulators can be used to teach medicine without cutting open a living being. Discarded human placentas may be used in place of animals for macrovascular surgery practice and can provide more accurate data for sensitivity to chemicals. The list goes on and on.
In conclusion, what we have here is a bloated, falsified, corrupt industry, maintained and policed by those benefiting from it. The inmates are running the asylum. We need a change. Millions of dollars and millions of animal lives are wasted every year on pointless testing. What can you do to help? All it takes is enough people to raise their voices, boycott pro-vivisectionist companies, and demand a change. One person may not be much, but together we can accomplish something.

what on earth has happened to the 'civilized' animal homo sapiens? i read and hear litany of horror and abuse of animals in laboratories, though none of the poor creatures are human. Why? if all the experimentation is for the 'benefit' of us cultured sophisticated people, why are we using different species other than us? answer - it would not be ethical. ?? so do the animals that have nail varnish injected in their eyes require it? are they going out of a saturday night and want to look cool? hmm, i doubt it.