Letter From Darlene Kaiser about Animal Research
Letters From All-Creatures.org and The Mary T. and Frank L. Hoffman Family Foundation

Letters to the Editor
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
P.O. Box 1909
Seattle, WA.  98111-1909
 
Dear Editor:
 
Re: “Animals and Research” (April 16), I’d like to quote Dr. Charles Mayo:  “Here’s something you can print in your paper.  I mean about the abuses, the cruelty and the horror of vivisection of living animals.  I abhor it.  It ought to be abolished.  I know of no achievement through vivisection, no scientific discovery that could not have been obtained without such barbarism and cruelty.  The whole thing is evil.”
 
Some believe animal research is humane.  Anyone reading this should attend Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee meetings at their universities to see what’s being done to animals behind locked laboratory doors.  You’ll hear of head-smashing experiments (for example) on everything from ducks to rabbits – supposedly to learn about head injury in humans.  The IACUC is just a bunch of “researchers” who put the rubber stamp of approval on each other’s experiments.
 
The Animal Welfare Act does NOT protect animals in National Institutes of Health funded experiments.  Anesthetics aren’t required. 
 
Dr. Robert Mendelsohn said, “The reason why I am against animal research is because it doesn’t work.  It has no scientific value, and every good scientist knows that.”
 
What about the harm that animal research has done?  Thalidomide safe on thousands of pregnant animals, yet caused women to give birth to deformed children. Humans were undergoing surgery without anesthetic long after chloroform had been discovered because it excited, rather than sedated, dogs!!  Morphine causes maniacal excitement in mice and rats.
 
We might not have penicillin if animal tests had been used because it’s toxic to many species.
 
Humans have gall bladders; rats don’t.  Rats can synthesize their own vitamin C; humans cannot.
 
In England doctors aren’t allowed to practice on animals because it leads to erroneous data.
 
Here, grants through government agencies make this a multi-billion dollar business.

Darlene Kaiser

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