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CANADIAN ACTIVISTS PROTEST AGAINST HLS & ANIMAL TESTING

Saturday, 28th February

Toronto activists condemn corporations that still test their products on animals

Protestors paced back and forth on the sidewalk near Yonge-Dundas Square while delivering a message to dozens of Toronto pedestrians.

Such testing, writes the Humane Society of the United States, “calls into question the ethics and humaneness of deliberately poisoning animals, the appropriateness of harming animals for the sake of marketing a new brand of sweetener, cleaner or weed killer, the applicability of animal data to humans, and the possibility of sparing millions of animals by developing alternatives to a handful of widely used procedures.”

Healthy animals kept in cages are infected with diseases, injected with foreign substances. When strapped in their harnesses, they are also made to inhale noxious gasses until they vomit or pass out or die, as shown in the most recent expose at HLS' primate units.

The bitter controversy over animal testing, wrote the Washington Post in a feature story last year, “highlights the slow pace of government efforts to replace or reduce the large numbers of animals used by pharmaceutical companies, chemical manufacturers and consumer firms to ensure that their products are safe for people. As a result, critics say, hundreds of thousands of mice, rabbits, hamsters and dogs continue to suffer and die unnecessarily in tests for pesticides, household cleaners, sunscreens and other products.”

A recent PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) report, Regulatory Testing: Why is the US so far behind Europe?, claimed that “the overwhelming majority of toxicity testing is based on science that is decades old and has no relevance to public or environmental health protection.” Yet the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM), the entity put in place ten years ago by the US Congress to reduce the use of animals in toxicity testing has only recommended four “alternative” test methods to regulatory agencies. Yet during the same period of time, its European counterpart recommended more than two dozen.

According to the Human Society, “the prestigious U.S. National Research Council (NRC) issued a report (last June) calling for a paradigm shift in toxicity testing, away from animal tests which, in some cases, were decades old, towards cell-based methods that model the early stages of toxicity in the human body.”

On Yonge Street, activists continue their protest and outreach, despite the bitter winter cold (-10 oC), Protestors continued to broadcast their appeal to passersby. “Animal testing goes on in relative secrecy by universities and research laboratories contracted by pharmaceutical companies,” said Kaiss, “producing unreliable results that are scientifically invalid because they can’t be applied to human beings.”

As activists made their impassioned plea to the masses, some stood side by side on the sidewalk holding signs that read ‘Huntingdon Life Sciences: Puppy Killers Close them Down!’ and ‘Animal Torture - Novartis and Huntingdon Life Sciences are to blame’ while others handed out ‘Close Down Huntingdon Life Sciences’ leaflets.

Besides needless pain and suffering, Kaiss believes that most animal testing research produces results of little value. “It doesn’t take a scientist to tell you if you get shampoo in your eye it’s going to sting,” said Kaiss, “or more research to know that you’re not supposed to drink mosquito repellent or oven cleaner.”

Animal testing alternatives now exist that include using human tissue in the laboratory, computer modeling, and “synthetic skin” (known as EPISKIN, EpiDerm or Corrositex). Experts contend that these techniques are “typically far more sophisticated and specific than traditional approaches to testing in whole animals, and many in vitro tests are capable of producing information about the biological effects of a test compound that are as accurate as―and in some cases more accurate than―information collected from studies in whole animals.”

They don’t want you to know the truth, but we will not shy away from our task of ending all animal experiments at HLS and all animal labs across the world.