Questioning the Costs and Benefits of Animal Research
Image by Тимур Бах from Pixabay.
Article by ADAV, published in True North Living and the Toronto Star
Canadians who are curious about whether their donations to medical charities are going toward animal experiments can turn to the ADAV Society.
re your tax dollars and charitable donations being directed toward cruel and outmoded animal experiments?
The Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection (ADAV) Society of BC wants to let you know.
Established by a concerned veterinarian in 1927, the ADAV Society strives to inform the public of the solid scientific argument against the use of animals in biomedical research.
Every year, millions of animals are used by Canada’s research establishment. Some of Canada’s leading medical charities — including the Canadian Cancer Society, the MS Society, and the Heart and Stroke Foundation — fund experiments on animals. The suffering of animals — from captivity, family deprivation, and denial of their natural instincts — is compounded by intentional harm caused to them by researchers in sterile laboratory settings.
Cruel testing but no breakthroughs
Yet, for all that these helpless animals endure, there have been no real medical breakthroughs in Canada in the last three decades. Stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and Parkinson’s all point to a major failure of Canadian researchers using animal models substituting for human beings.
As developers of the rapid-to-market COVID-19 vaccine and antibody treatments can attest, their life-saving therapies were fast-tracked, using minimal animal testing, rather than the several years’ worth of testing on various species that most drug development entails — futilely, as 92 percent of drugs that pass the animal testing phase fail in human trials.
To ensure that generous donations to medical charities are directed toward sophisticated human-based research such as organs-on-a-chip, 3D printing, and other innovative technologies, visit the searchable database at humanecharities.ca, a site created by ADAV, to find which medical charities do or do not fund animal experiments.
