Hello,

It’s International Animal Rights Day today and we wanted to take a moment to remember animals suffering needlessly in animal research.

Every year, millions of animals in Canada experience excruciating pain and die in the name of research that does not reliably predict human outcomes. Live animals are used for burn research, psychological and physical pain research, given cancer, blinded, subjected to broken bones or strokes, swim tests in icy water, forced to inhale smoke and more. All when alternative ways of conducting research exist and it has been shown time and time again that, in research, animal models produce misleading results. Animal physiology is different to human physiology. For example, 90% of drugs that have tested safe in animals have proven unsafe for humans.

Just to give you a sense of how bad it is, University of British Columbia has recently released its 2019 use of animals in research and teaching protocols. They used 151,239 live animals. Thanks in large part to our Stop UBC Animal Research Campaign, UBC has not done any category E experiments in the past several years. This category involves severe pain, at, or above the pain tolerance of unanesthetized conscious animals. However 55 % of their experiments still involve the 2^nd highest level of pain, known as category D,  which is described by UBC as involving moderate to severe distress or discomfort.

Animal Defense and Anti-Vivisection Society has been working hard to put an end to all the pain, fear, despair, and suffering in animal research laboratories.

We now have three petitions going:

To stop the cruel behavioral experiments being done on live animals at UBC:
https://www.change.org/p/end-cruel-stress-tests-on-animals-at-ubc

To stop the burn research being done on live animals:
https://www.change.org/p/bc-fire-fighters-stop-funding-cruel-outdated-research-on-animals

To stop animal research labs from being added to the new St. Paul’s Hospital building in Vancouver:
https://www.change.org/NoLabAnimals

We also have a billboard up near Vancouver’s Burrard Street Bridge, making people aware of our humanecharities.ca site that lists medical charities that do not fund research on animals. Please consider this resource when deciding where to put your donation dollars. If you like our work, consider us too! You can donate to us via the donate button on this site.

Thank you for remembering those who can’t speak for themselves.