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Vivisection/HLS

By Kevin Kjonaas

Typically when I discuss vivisection, the experimentation on live animals, I divided up my attack on this barbaric practice between a run through of the scientific fallacies and failures owed to it and the grave and tragic misgivings I see in its violence to other sentient, pain-feeling, beings. But really to me, as reminded by my dog, it is always the suffering that matters most. The indignity, terror, trauma, and slaughter of those innocent to our human afflictions that so offends deeply in me the crisis of animal experimentation. That this model of research does not produce medical advancements and kills and maims many humans as well is just the salt in the wound.

As you read this article, no matter what your belief or opinion is on the matter of animal research, pro-, anti, confused, everyone should feel the inclination and obligation to question the effectiveness of something the public is paying for so dearly - in both astounding financial costs and with the deepest of hopes and aspirations for progressive and positive healthcare.

Being human animals, we are afforded a great variety of choices in our lives. This freedom allows us the ability to impact the lives of others around us, and the very complex web of life on this planet. With this freedom and choice comes a responsibility to critically examine the ethical perimeters of this ability, and our humanity requires us to give consideration to those whose lives we can and will impact. With research on animals, the choice is being made in our names - for our toothpastes, coffee sweeteners, addictions, colds, aches and pains, and diseases - and we therefore must scrutinize with the greatest of care this topic.

I started my journey to such a study years ago. When I was 14 I had the traumatic experience of watching my best friend slowly die from brain cancer. I watched as painfully the tumors in his head grew until one actually dislodged his left eye. I watched my best friend die.

I also watched my grandmother slowly forget her family's existence and how to function in her own body as Alzheimer's took over and ended her life. Just a couple months ago I said a tearful goodbye to my grandfather as he finally succumbed to Parkinson's disease.

Through each experience I watched as my friends and family got taken on a roller coast ride of emotion with the hopes that the current methods of research would ease the pain, prolong the life a little longer, or ever stave off death from the illness.

To say because I am against vivisection that I am therefore anti-science is personally offensive. I want more than anything for there to be cures, therapies, vaccines, and medicines to improve our healthcare - but simply put, animal research is not providing this model for success.

Last year a senior editor at NewsWeek had two major articles published in the Wall Street Journal (hardly a bastion of liberalism or leftist politics) examining - and really - attacking the waste in animal research.

She found, just as my family did - that the 'promising' studies with lab mice showed an experimental Alzheimer's vaccine that blocked the formation of analyoid plagues (thought to be the cause of the disease). That lab rats with research-inflected spinal cord damage have awkwardly walked again. And, that we have cured cancer in enough rodents to fill the New York City subway system. For people however, there is NO cure for spinal cord injury (as Chris Reeves could have told us), or Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's, or multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, osteoporosis, brain and other cancers, and the list goes on.

She states - with taxpayer funds of $30 billion being dished out by the National Institute of Health to such studies - the "patients have been too patient with this research." Because it is not working, and as appropriate in the Wall Street Journal could put it - our investment is not paying off.

And why is it not working? Why is the animal-based research method failing us? Why are more people getting sicker than ever before with such debilitating diseases despite the billons of dollars, countless hours, and unlimited energy?

We are examining the wrong models and essentially playing the lottery with animal experimentation. We are putting everything we've got on one number and spinning that roulette wheel hoping for a miracle.

Our bodies are different. This is basic. My dog could drink from a puddle on the street and not get sick - if you or I did that we would get violently ill. Just as I wouldn't study feline leukemia in elephants, or ovarian cysts by artificially creating them in men we shouldn't be looking at uniquely human ailments, crudely reproduced in non-human models that generally if ever at all suffer from such conditions.

Modern science has evolved so much that we now understand and should be treating diseases on a molecular level. These molecular differences between species, between humans and animals, can lead to a huge variation in what diseases we are pre-disposed to, and how to treat them. Trying to extrapolate treatments from those genetically and cellularly different can, has, does, and will continue to lead to lethal consequences.

When looking at diseases the cellular difference is more important than superficial similarities like that all animals (human and non-human) feel pain, have brains, exhibit preferences and all mammals have immune systems, hearts, and lungs. There are vast differences in our very physiologies, metabolisms, anatomies, genes, and psychology.

We are complicated creatures with differing organ systems that interact in many subtle ways. The national AV society points out that, for example, rodents deposit plaque fatty acids in the liver while humans deposit plaque in the blood vessels. Unlike humans, rodents have no gall bladders. Cats lack enzymes that make it impossible for them to metabolize ibuprofen. The circulation system of dogs is vastly different than that of humans as they walk on four legs. This sort of list is endless.

When we study how vaccines, therapies, and medicines act we must take a holistic look at our species, and the differences in those species being used as the model before we become the test subjects. Most importantly we must concentrate more on a microscopic level where differences are most profound.

The animal model paradigm may have been useful a couple hundred years ago (albeit perhaps not even then) when so little was known about our anatomy on a macroscopic level. They could have provided a very basic picture of how an organism works, but today's scientists are studying the phenomenon on the very level that differentiates species from one another the molecular level.

That these vast differences are crippling our healthcare system is evidenced by the glaring statistics, recalled drugs, and rising disease rates.

Consider that 1 in 7 hospital beds are filled with someone suffering the side effects on animal tested drugs. That the 4th leading cause of death in this country is adverse reaction to prescription drugs tested safe for human use in non-human animal models.

Remember that smoking was once thought non-carcinogenic because smoking related cancer could not be reproduced in lab animals like dogs.

That Benzene was not withdrawn from use as an industrial chemical despite the epidemiological and clinical studies showing it caused leukemia, because manufacturer-sponsored tests on mice failed to find this.

That although arsenic was a known-carcinogenic for decades scientists still found little evidence to support this position because of their failures with animal studies.

Asbestos was exposed to and killed many because scientists could not reproduce the cancer in animals.

Pacemakers and heart valves were delayed in development because of physiological differences between the animals they were designed on and the humans they were put into.

Animal models of heart disease failed to show that a high cholesterol and fatty diet increases the risk of coronary artery disease.

Animal studies predicted that beta-blockers would not lower blood pressure. This withheld their development. Even animal researchers admitted their failure of animal models of hypertension in this regard as thousands unnecessarily suffered from strokes.

Cyclosporin A inhibits organ rejection, and its development was a watershed in the success of transplant operations. Had human evidence not overwhelmed the unpromising evidence from animal research it would not have been released.

Flosint, an arthritis medication, was tested on rats, monkeys, and dogs - all tolerated the medication well. In humans it caused death.

Fialuridene, an anti-viral medication caused liver damage in 7 out of the 15 people it was tried on. Five eventually died, 2 needed liver transplants. But it worked swimmingly in woodchucks.

Opren, an arthritis medication, killed 61 people and caused over 3500 severe reactions before being withdrawn from the market. It exhibited no problems in the tests on primates and various other animals.

Domperidone, designed as a treatment for nausea and vomiting caused irregular heart problems. Scientists were unable to reproduce this result in dogs despite giving them up to 70 times the dosage than people were taking.

And of course they famous ones like Phen-phen, Thalidomide, and now Vioxx that have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people.

And one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century, Penicillin, despite proving ineffective in rabbits, Dr. Flemming used the antibiotic on a very sick patient who had little hope. Thankfully his original tests were not on guinea pigs (the traditional and famous lab animal) as it kills them. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for this discovery, Dr. Flemming stated, "How fortunate we didn't have these animal tests in the 1940's, for Penicillin would probably never have been granted a license and the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized."

15% of all hospital admissions are caused by these human reactions to animal-tested drugs, and this aspect along is costing the American public over $136 billion dollars annually.

In August of last year the acting FDA chief, Lester Crawford, stated that only 8% of the drugs tested safe and cleared through animal studies make it to the market place, and that half of these then fail in the last stage of Phase 3 clinical trials. This is an astounding statistic. Animal research has at least a 92% failure rate. Of any given 100 drugs that are created with animal models, required human clinical trials widdle out all but 4 of them, and out of those four drugs we get the 4th leading cause of death and 1 in seven people suffering side effects.

Who in this room can honestly say you are happy with this? That you think that animal research is a predictive model for discovery?

People are the real test subjects if all that proceeds the clinical trials are animal studies. We are the guinea pigs and vivisection provides no safeguard. Never let anybody or any animal research organization getting rich off these horrendous results tell you that the choice is animal research or testing on people because this is what they are precisely doing.

Animal research is a crapshoot. Determining which drug, on which animal, under which variable can produce information we can safely extrapolate for human use is like I said, a lottery, as the odds are not in our favor and we cannot rely on this for results.

There are alternatives, though. There are over 400 alternatives to animal based studies. They are safe and offer great promise. And it is here we should be demanding more time and resources be spent.

These alternatives and non-violent methods range from the time-tested to the postmodern with names I can barely pronounce.

The study of human cadavers has given useful information about the biological processes that is credited with the base understanding in the whole field of modern medicine - righting the gross misrepresentation of what animal dissection taught 5th century scholars about circulation.

The man known as the 'Father of Medicine,' Hippocrates, championed the still necessary field of clinical studies. This patient based research is still one of the best ways of predicting the course of a disease is to study the cases of it in people.

Since the 17th century, epidemiologists have focused on the variables surrounding the incidence of disease while today molecular epidemiologists relate factors occurring on the cellular level with the other data such as lifestyle, environment, and occupational factors.

And today we've advanced to such a time when current medical breakthroughs are household names like the human genome project and the stem-cell research.

The pro-research group Americans For Medical Advancements extols these breakthrough investigative areas as advances in technology, like x-ray crystallography, synchrotron, radiation sources, neutron sources, nuclear magnetic resonance, and other spectroscopies for molecular structure determinants, laser molecular tweezers, combinatorial and solid phase synthesis, DNA sequencing, drug delivery devices, polymerase chase chain reaction, gene chips, CT scans, functional MRIs, position emission topography, single photon emission computed topography, event related optical signals, nanotechnology, neural nets and many others allowing scientists to see how the human body works like never before giving reliable drug feedback, disease origins, and promise to discovery and cures.

But it is all sadly very, very under-funded (except for California where over $3 billion in state funds have been allocated to stem cell research just to spite our scientifically-challenged president who thinks the jury is still out on topics like evolution).

According to the Americans for Medical Progress, &qout;new drugs can be discovered and studied using structure activity relationships, high throughput drug screening, combinatorial chemistry, physiochemical properties, cell cultures, organ cultures, computer arched drug designs, and how computer chips with human DNA. As we understand more of how genes are involved in disease, we can and should test the potential drugs against the genetic responses on the DNA level."

The Human Genome project is doing just that, providing knowledge of many genes and proteins so that medications can be specifically designed to treat diseases of the cardiovascular system, cancer, bones, and others.

Instead of testing on animals, whose genes, metabolism, and lifestyles are so different than humans, scientists should be trying to understand our human ailments specific to our individual genetic make up tailoring drugs not just to our species, or sex, but to each individual.

There are alternatives out there. They are being used, are successful, but in comparison to animal models of research are grossly under-funded, under-used, and sadly misunderstood.

Why then? Why if everything I say is true - that animal research is such a fraud, that it is so pervasive and protected? Surely all of these researchers in their pristine white laboratories and ivory towers can not all be wrong, right?

There is a popular saying for this - there are two types of doctors that support animal research, those who don't any better and those who make money from it.

The former is largely those MDs we see in hospitals whose work is very disconnected from research, and only did basic animal studies in medical school (not used today at leading schools like John Hopkins, Harvard, and scores of others). Their contact with animal research is when the pharmaceutical rep is buying them lunch, giving them Broadway tickets, or supplying their clinic with tons of free samples. They support animal research because they have never had reason to question it. A friend of mine is a trauma surgeon in an ER. Daily he and his colleagues save lives and he said he knows of virtually no doctor that pays attention to the research publications or pronouncements because they've heard them all before, %quot;the cure is always on the way."

The reason vivisection persists is money. The pharmaceutical industry is not at all about saving patients, it is about increasing profits. Their drugs treat symptoms not causes. This industry is made of businesses, not charities, and they answer to shareholders.

It is evidenced in that:

According to the Congressional Budget Office the average price for patented drugs in 25 other industrialized countries are 35 to 55% lower than in the U.S.

That Americans spend twice as much per person for healthcare as do Canadians, Japanese, and Europeans according to the World Health Organization and we are not getting our monies worth as the U.S. has the shortest life expectancies, and highest infant and child mortality rates than Canada, Japan, and Europe.

This could be for a couple of reasons, that A: 40% of this country takes at least one prescription drug daily, (one in six take at least three) and those nasty side effects are catching up, or rather our healthcare system, drug companies included, are not about helping those in need as 15% of uninsured children and 28% of uninsured adults go without the help they need because of costs, and 1 in 3 are estimated to have gone without food to help pay for their exorbitantly priced medications.

The research industry and drug companies care so much for their precious profits that they'll go to whatever corrupt lengths to get their way (besides passing their unsafe poisons through animal studies.)

As you've heard from the Merck scandal where the drug Vioxx was approved by the FDA, the agency in charge of protecting the population from dangerous pills is broken under the weight of industry pressure.

Testimony given by Dr. David Graham, a leading FDA drug reviewer in November charged that the agency was yielding to political pressure to speed drugs through the approval process, and as a result stated, is unable to protect America from more unsafe drugs finding their way onto the market, into our homes, in ultimately our mouths.

Two years ago a government survey was conducted and 400 FDA scientists were interviewed. The results were only reluctantly released two months ago after a long battle by a public interest group with the Freedom of Information Act forced its airing. It stated that 2/3 of the FDA researchers said they are NOT convinced their agency monitors drugs safely and efficiently. 18% said they had been pressured to recommend drugs they had serious and grave reservations about.

Why would they do this? For starters, thanks to the drug industry's Drug User Fee Act of 1992, the industry pays roughly $300 million a year into the FDA, causing some reviewers to overlook red flags. But hey, don't take just my word for it, pick up any newspaper or pay attention to the political tone in Washington with regards to this corrupt process.

How could this one industry, so dependant on the fraud of animal research and coercion get away with it all? Surely the government would intervene, the academic establishment, or even us smart citizens, right?

Wrong - the vivisection industry is the biggest lobby group in Washington. It spent about $26 million in the 2000 congressional races alone (we don't know 06 yet). It gave Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist over $200,000 for his campaign.

It's new top lobbyist is the recently retired longtime congressman Bill Tauzin, who prior to his new appointment exercised jurisdiction over the industry as Chairman of the Energy and Ways Committee - and was the one responsible for prohibiting the government from intervening and negotiating with the pharmaceuticals to lower their prices. He now gets a million a year to lobby for his old friends.

They also get what legislation they want, like the new limits on class action lawsuits (ahem, Vioxx). And according to a spokesperson for the Nevada Senator, John Ensign - legislation will be reintroduced next month to shield drug companies against product liability.

The wool is being pulled over our eyes as well - and our trusted doctors. Big animal-testing drug companies spend $21 billion a year on marketing their products. This is more than double what they spend on their actual "research and development."

More than 90% of it is directed solely at doctors, averaging about $6,000 to $11,000 per MD. They are given lavish vacations, free gourmet lunches, golf excursions, and most importantly of all - early $11 billion's worth in free samples. They are a more cleaned up version of the dirty street drug peddler that gets you hooked so you keep coming back for more at jacked up prices.

Academic institutions play along as well, as their sponsorships, collaborations, and often research buildings come from these very corporations. Big grants, big buildings, and lots of prestige come from not challenging this broken and corrupt system. There are many who make money from it, the universities, the regulation bureaucrats, the scientific journals, animal breeders, lawyers, insurance companies, etc - the list goes on with this gravy train.

Many of your local university animal researchers are dependent upon it. Their jobs and prestige revolve around this "publish or perish" push for academic papers. Such a motive is for the quantity of studies, not the quality. Unlike human clinical research, animal experimentation generates faster results with less effort. For every one paper a clinician publishes - an animal researcher generates five on bizarre and repetitive topics.

Many researchers are resistant to change. They are rooted in this tradition and it tells them animal research is an appropriate method of investigation. And after a while - their ego may as well. So many within this field have devoted years of their lives to this pursuit. Their whole self-image as a researcher stands at jeopardy if they are to admit decades of their work could have been performed better - and worse yet - could have saved lives. Their position is supported by a similarly threatened community and from peer pressure. Those who do speak out, question, or are critical are often ostracized and denounced.

Beyond this scientific shortfall, animal research suffers far worse from the ethical test it fails. As do, in my opinion, all forms of use and exploitation which includes eating their dead bodies.

Animal exploitation is the most socially ingrained prejudice on the face of the earth. Billions of animals are murdered each year. Entire industries and economies depend on their suffering and death. Our palate is trained to crave their flesh. Our fashion dictates we wear their skins. We find entertainment in stripping them of their dignity and forcing once proud creatures onto toy bicycles or to jump through hoops of fire. Specie-ism is a form of discrimination and oppression unlike any other in history, both in magnitude and in violence.

This is a form of oppression and it is called specie-ism. We justify this prejudice with the same tired and shallow excuses we used to defend racist and sexist behavior. All of these forms of oppression are rooted in the arguments that - we are smarter, God gave us dominion, and it is for their own good.

And just as men are not smarter than women, slavery was not in the best interest of black Africans, and God did not give the United States of America the moral authority over any other nation or peoples - animals are sentient, they are intelligent, complex, and social beings whose interests are not best served on our dinner plates, as our coats, or wearing our eye make up.

Fighting for animal liberation is a revolutionary social movement that seeks to challenge these social constructions of dietary, cultural, and industrial habits to be more compassionate and to foster a more sustainable planet.

Advocating for the rights of animals does not mean we demand these beings have the right to vote or drive a car, but rather more simply - that recognition be paid that these other beings have the capacity to suffer, who are a part of a very complex web of life, and whose existence is not simply for human benefit. Our humanity requires we err on the side of ethical treatment, always, and should we fail in this regard to animals there is little reason left why we cannot exploit severely retarded children, cognitively impaired infants, or those currently incarcerated.

Animal Rights asks that we simply extend our circle of compassion beyond our species barrier and show respect for all life, as we are all animals.

Even still, if you are stubbornly fixated on animal research for medical purposes, or still sitting on the fence, at a very basic level we can all take a couple first steps together towards a common ground where we can recognize the moral deficiencies.

We can all agree that at least - cosmetic and household product testing on animals is wrong and should be boycotted. This is the reason I am a full-time volunteer on the campaign to close down one of the world;s biggest product testing labs, Huntingdon Life Sciences.

About four years ago a video changed my life. What I saw in it affected me so profoundly as the lab technicians in this company called Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) were abusing beagles. You see, I kind of have this snoopy-fixation. As a child I had him painted on all my bedroom walls, he was my favorite cartoon, and I grew up with a little beagle named Barney. He was my best friend. We shared everything - he slept in my bed, I slept in his. He chewed on my toys, I played with his. He ate my food, while... I never ate his. He was everything to me and what influenced me to take a greater look at animal testing and the issue of animal rights was in High School when I saw ghastly footage of beagles being forced to smoke. Before I had to turn myself into prison, I shared my life with Willy - another beagle buddy and the defacto SHAC mascot. He is so precious, sensitive, loving, and more than anything - hungry.

Having had beagles for so long, and knowing how great all dogs are, it was with nausea that I watched what happened at HLS and saw, and really heard, beagles experience things and make noises I have never heard in my whole life.

Huntingdon Life Sciences is one of the world’s biggest contract research organizations. It has two facilities in the UK - one from which it takes its namesake, and one in New Jersey. At any one time it has roughly 70,000 animals kept imprisoned in its labs, including mice, cats, dogs, primates, birds, fish, rabbits, and various farm animals. It counts as its clients the biggest and the worst of those pharmaceutical drug companies, agrichemical companies, industrial chemical companies, and petrochemical companies.

We are talking about GlaxoSmithKline, Dow Chemicals, Monsanto, Shell, Novartis, Merck, and countless other smaller biotechs.

On any given day this lab kills roughly 500 animals, that is 180,000 a year in needless experiments for coffee sweeteners, tanning lotions, diet drugs, caramel food coloring, perfume ingredients, and the list goes on.

This is not the first time HLS was caught abusing animals.

• 1989, with Sarah Kite
• 1996, with Zoe Barton
• 1997, with Michelle Rokke
• 1995-2000, with Xenotransplanation
• 2006, HLS employee speaks out

And in between we have exposed HLS for using 4 day old puppies in chemical experiments. Testing Splenda on 1,100 pregnant rabbits and over 100 times the dosage people will take. Suffice it to say these small little creatures did not bode well before this super sweet chemical sugar went onto make beagles vomit blood, and primates to become extremely hyper.

A senior HLS scientific advisor, Dr. Ralph Heywood, even said about his company's research method that "at best guess for the correlation of adverse reactions in man and animal toxicity is somewhere between 5 and 25%."

Kind of begs the obvious question of, oh, I don't know - what about the other 75 to 95% of the time.

HLS is a sham organization that exists for the lies of companies like Monsanto, as animal research is the insurance backdoor clause for many. Say you eat an apple that was sprayed with a pesticide...

HLS has become a symbol of all that is wrong with the drug testing and the animal-abusing industry

You don't need to be a radical to be a cruelty free shopper. You don't need to be conscious of the fact that animal research has a 92% failure rate, causes our fourth leading cause of death, is protected by an unscrupulous industry that price gauges the poor, and lies to gets it products onto the market at the expense of our health. You only need to be compassionate to the beagle buddies like my Barney and Willy. To recognize, that all of us can make a difference for safe science and for some animal rights.

Check out: www.curedisease.com and www.insidehls.com for more info.