An easy target once again. Why not get together wreck Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, Two Jags Jaguars etc. etc. etc.

Errrmmm no? I know let's wreck some cancer event.

Doesn't any activist get cancer these days?

It's good to know that when so many eople are motivated to try and do some good in the world there is someone from the activist community to come along with their innacurate crap and try and screw things up.

You must feel so good about yourselves

Wankers !

Oh dear oh dear, out come the benefactors, sniffers, supporters and general brown-noses to the animal murderers in the disgusting vivisection industry.

Glad you're upset. Change can cause upset.

'cancer survivor ' heh heh 'great emotive name!' ; )

what exactly is it that you fight for in your daily life? more useless dirty animal butchery no doubt on the slabs in the vivisection labs!

Put a plug in it.

Au revoir

Dear me. Kill humans not animals. Grip on reality here HeX-23.

Those poor bunnies, those poor cats. (I'm crying gallons of tears!)

HeX-23 it would be pretty ironic if you were diagnosed with cancer my friend! lol

Au revoir
Root Toot Toot

Against animal torture? Got to laugh at these two faced clowns.

Throw stuff at police horses during the week and pray for the poor bunnies the next.

i have cancer right now, i am told it is spreading from my left breast into the glands under my arm pits. i am so scared that all these talented people and all the funding is all being wasted on these endless animal experiments, and i am scared because suddenly my life depends on it. i like to think i am fairly reasonable and rational. rightly or wrongly i do believe i would support animal research if it was as important as the vested interests make out. however, i spent many years doing my own research and came to the conclusion that animal testing is deeply unreliable and rather than helping the effort to find cures and treatments, in fact sets it back many times with bad results which don't relate to the human body's systems. that was when it was all theory, now its real and i regret having never stood up and done anything about my views. big up to the animal rights protestors, i reckon, at least the ones that don't physically hurt humans in the process (we are animals too!).

Someone's being hurt badly judging by the above negative comments? Probably all from the same poster.

Change hurts if you can't let go when the time has come to let go.

Animal testing is a brutality that we are about to make history.

...for a rational and personal comment.

The point about animal testing is that it hurts humans just as much as animals-often the results obtained are not applicable to humans (aspirin kills small rodents, PCP tranquilises large mammals like horses (the last I was told by a medical student rather too keen on the contents of vetinary drug cabinets, and have not double checked)).

Research companies have shown a lack of ethics when releasing products which damage people but are profitable- think Thalidomide for morning sickness or silicone breast prostheses which leak and result in ME-type symptoms.

Drugs are tested extensively before release,including the LD50 test which is required to establish the dose at which 50% of the test animal population dies, but the testing done does not reliably establish the effects on the human population. They are just a hoop to be jumped through before money is made.

Tests are done for chemically identical drugs when produced by different companies. Drugs are developed without there being a clinical/medical requirement for their existence- the demand is created later by the marketing department.

If the whinging neds above really cared about people they wouldn't be so quick spouting irrational and anti-scientific gobshite which supports an industry which cares more about profit than people,let alone animals.

Your not taking any treatment at all for your cancer?

Your not taking any tablets etc.?

Your going to die?

Good luck!

Animals feel pain and suffering too.

How people can quite happily purposely breed and infect something that can feel pain only goes to show me that some people think they are better than all of the other creatures. Well, here's a newsflash for you - we're not - apart from we're supposed to be civilised.

:(

I bet I can check cancerous ones peer reviewed research articles and logic and come to the same conclusion if they were able to give the info. However my guess is that their research comes from a few internet pages and a couple of half baked ideas based on at most a Bachelors University Degree. Yeah scientists get money to study this shit but most of the real research is done from unbiased money not on pharmaceutical money which does "applications". Research scientists are not rich and do their job because they're interested in how it all works and therefore do not do studies just to make a result fit, (definitely not true when talking about pharma corps naturally). To suggest that all the research done by basic science on animals is worthless and a load of old tosh is basically talkin out your arse. Working with animals is the last thing most people want to do because it is a fucking pain in the arse and unpleasant. Although I am grateful for the oversight your pressure groups give us to ensure that the best standards can be maintained, although I wish we focused research and money on more curable diseases in sub sahara blah blah... I think giving cancer sufferers a hard time makes you the sickest bunnies I ever would like to stick a blade in.

Although there is a lot that should be changed in the direction of scientific endeavour, from rich beneficiaries to poor etc etc it has little bearing on what can be achieved without slicing up some animals. If you think a couple of hundred pussy cats experiencing pain is not a reasonable cost for creating reasonable burn alleviation and recovery medication for a screaming infant with multiple burns then I hope I never have to remind you of your decision. Cats indeed sense the pain and have similar skin to ours which is why they are used for burns experiments. Do we think we are better than animals? No, we are biologists, we are more accutely aware of our closeness to animals than most. We are different from animals, we can communicate learning through a complex language which allows knowledge to be disseminated rapidly. Knowledge which can help and alleviate pain for many people (if they can afford it but that is a different question) and animals. One scientific discovery can have massive impacts on the well being of millions of lives of all types. We concur with attacks on the direction / funding / corporate takeover of science but don't expect to win over many scientists by attacking the need for animal experiments for medical science..... it's lunacy. The two are separate issues altogether and animal rights don't do the anticorporate groups any favours by aligning themselves with them.

VIVISECTION AND CANCER

CANCER
Vivisectors cling onto the claim that they will cure cancer because people fear cancer. They have no arguments to back up their claims.

Vivisection has been used to 'research' cancer for a century and a half. Despite the millions of animals given cancer, their are no advances in the treatment of cancer attributable to animal work. Much of the improved survival rates are due to earlier detection than before. Studies in animals have been rendered impossible due to species difference. As the medical doctor, Prof. Vernon Coleman wrote: '...animals get different types of cancer to human beings, animals respond quite differently to drugs.....researchers working with animals have held back medical progress and have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths'.

The most commonly used animals in cancer are rats and mice, which are used almost exclusively. Rodents do not develop the same type of cancer as us. They develop sarcomas - cancer in connective tissue such as bone or muscle. We generally develop carcinomas - cancer in lining membranes such as the lining of the lung. We develop cancer over years of exposure to carcinogens, periods many times the lifespan of laboratory animals. The conditions which cause cancer are very different, and this has caused enormous problems in human health care as the results of animal use have proved inapplicable to humans. Leukaemia has never been found in any animal other than man.

Drug companies do not deny this. Many drugs have caused illness such as cancer in lab animals, but this has been ignored, on the basis that animal work is inconclusive. This can hardly be denied due the vague nature of such research. It has been found that rats and mice give contradicting results in tests. For example, carbon tetrachloride causes liver cancer in mice, but liver cirrhosis in rats. Even sex makes a difference: male rats have developed cancer more readily than females in petrol testing, and chloroform causes cancer in female mice but not males. One study confused vivisectors when one colony of mice suffered rates of cancer of over 90% while another hardly saw any. This was tracked down eventually to the use of sawdust from different woods. Around half of lab mice will develop cancer by age two years without exposure to testing. How can we draw conclusions for humans when results differ according to factors such as species, sex and even bedding?

According to animal experiments, cigarettes do not cause cancer, and it was these results which delayed health warnings on tobacco products for years. Testing known human carcinogens in rats and mice led to less than half of the substances causing cancer in rats OR mice. If the researchers had flipped a coin, they would have had correct results half the time - which would be more accurate than the vivisectionist method.

Vivisectors may try to defend their practice, but in unguarded moments the truth may slip out. In 1995 a London based vivisector (Dr T Chu) painted coal-tar on animals, then concluded 'But how that relates to the human system, nobody actually knows'.. Another (Dr P Shubik) wrote of cancer 'we still do not have a good animal model' and went on to write 'our animal models are totally and absolutely inadequate...'. On the subject of testing foodstuffs for cancer risks it has become apparent that the tests have become thoroughly discredited. For example, in testing artificial sweeteners, mice were given the equivalent of over 550 bottles of drink per day. Saccharin tests were at dose levels of humans consuming over 800 bottles per day. Even a vivisector, (H F Kraybill) noted that these tests 'in no way, related to potential environmental or industrial exposure in man'.

Not only do animals react differently to substances when we are examining the cause of cancer, but they also do when we are considering a cure. The first drug to be used specially for cancer treatment was Actinomycin D. This antibiotic is a failure in animals. In mice it fails, and in monkeys it has been shown to be lethal. Although such results discouraged the use of it, Actinomycin D is still used, although if animal testing was really believed, it would have been discarded in the belief that it was useless. Other chemotherapy drugs were developed before animal testing was applied, or were used despite the fact that they failed animal tests. Urethane is effective in treating human leukaemia, but causes cancer in mice. Clearly vivisection has no claim for success.

While vivisectors make claims about the scientific nature of their work, the reverse is often true. An undercover study of a lab in Hammersmith, London (1995) involved mice raised in sterile conditions, living off sterilised food and water with no human contact. When released, at weaning from isolators (sealed bubbles they live in, to prevent contamination) they lived in rooms in which hygiene was strict: sterilised food and water, technicians had to change into sterilised clothes on entering and use masks, gloves, hat, overshoes and a sterilised apron. Vivisectors were seen entering the room wearing outdoor clothes and shoes, with no hat, mask or overshoes, maybe putting on gloves or the apron. Under these conditions, infection is inevitable.


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PAGE TWO


THE THINGS THEY SAY
Dealing with the claims of the vivisectors.

Vivisectors use the same arguments over and over again. They are all easy not only to beat, but to destroy. To counter 'claims' of cruelty, they hide behind a) 'strict government guidelines' and b) 'sensitive, caring staff'.

There are no strict guidelines controlling animal use. Very little is actually illegal in the lab, in the sense that you could go to prison for it. The Code Of Practice is a voluntary code which outlines the conditions which animals live and die in. For example, it says adult cats, housed alone, should have 87cm by 87cm of floor space (less than 3ft X 3ft). Many statements are vague, eg on the section on housing primates it says 'Cages should have adequet floor space...'. Note the word 'should', not 'must"' or 'adequate' is open to all sorts of debate. Although a very basic level of welfare, this is constantly breached in practice. It is NOT illegal to breach this code.

Evidence from investigations into laboratory practice have shown mice overcrowded at three times their recommended density (nine mice in a cage meant for three). Some of these cages housed litter mates from the same litter together, so inbred, accidental litters were born. These had to be killed (by banging the heads on the floor). In the same lab, the labs own records showed that over two thirds (68%) of mice bred were surplus to experimental needs, and were gassed. The gassing equipment was substandard, which made it impossible to gas the hundreds of animals each week according to the COP because it was impossible to control the flow of gas well enough. This chamber was filthy, and the animals became panicked and fought to escape. Death was not confirmed, and many were found to have recovered, although more may have recovered while buried in the body, and suffocated.

With larger animals, eg cats, dogs, and monkeys, vivisectors claim controls are much stricter. This is because the public, and the staff themselves, are more sensitive to the needs of the animals. Also with more publically sensitive experiments, eg brain research.

EVERY laboratory investigated has been PROVED to be thoroughly inadequate in terms of compliance to the COP and welfare standards. This is true regardless of species or type of experiment. I worked with monkeys in brain experiments. Monkeys were found in cages measuring little more than the length of their own bodies, with no companionship. No furniture or stimulation were allowed, and they were denied toys. There was no bedding. These animals are agreed to be highly intelligent, with an intellect comparable to that of a human child. THESE ARE THE VERY EXPERIMENTS VIVISECTORS CLAIM ARE SO CLOSELY SCRUTINISED, yet all the breaches were documented on video. One monkey was suffering from the deprivation and constantly paced the floor of her cage in a repetative circle, typical of a depressed animal. This was a highly contreversial experiment. It involved a total of 55 macaques, 6 squirrel monkeys, four cats, and a squirrel monkey which would be reused in another experiment, which would have been illegal up to 1986. The vivisector himself had written ten years previously of the problems connected with comparing the macaque and human brains, as had other researchers. One wrote 'we cannot use the macaque brain even as a rough guide' .

Rabbits are used at the rate of nearly 170 per day in UK labs. They have been filmed (1994-5) in battery conditions, housed singly. Up to 60 were kept at any time, in metal cages which rattled whenever a rabbit moved, so the noise level was significant. Many were terrified of humans, and staff were scared to handle them, which made them worse. Every few hours, a noisy and temperamental automatic cleaner would scrape down the trough under their grid floors. Rest was probably impossible. The single housing and poor food added to their stress levels, and weight loss was common. At one weighing, six were found to have lost 7% or more of their bodyweight in a week, one had lost 11%. On one occasion a door was left open on a cage and the rabbit fell five feet to a hard floor.
Other breaches proved in UK labs include dogs housed without bedding or furniture, which has been documented on at least five occasions - dogs have never been documented as being kept with these. Animals have been inspected weekly instead of daily, which led to dead animals lying in cages with live mates for up to a week.


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PAGE THREE


VIVISECTION-THE REALITY
1989 - National Institute of Medical Research, Mill Hill, London
While most of us do not believe the claims of the vivisectors, that they are strictly controlled and that the animals are protected by law, we need to present EVIDENCE that this is the case. As all vivisection is done in secret, the only genuine information we have on the reality of the trade is through undercover investigation.

When Prof Wilhelm Feldberg was investigated, he was working at one of the most prestigious labs in the country. He himself was supposedly a highly distinguished scientist and had won the CBE, so the practices here were presumed to be among the best. He was working with cats and rabbits on the levels of blood sugar and hyperglycemia (the excess of blood sugar) caused by heating the skin. It was known that heating the skin and hyperglycemia were related since at least 1974. Feldberg's assistant knew this. When Feldberg was asked if he knew about other research, he replied 'I don't know because I never read other people's papers'. The assistant (John Stean) said of other papers on the subject: 'I sat down once and read one to him and he promptly went off to sleep !'

The experiment involved burning the skin with an anglepoise lamp. The anaesthetic used was Sagatal, which laboratory textbooks state is not suitable for rabbits, while more effecient ones were available. Doses were poorly calculated, resulting in revival of the animals on many occasions, and many animals were filmed reacting when scalpels, heat, or needles were used. On other occasions too much was used, and windpipe tubes were needed. Stean (Feldberg's assistant) said 'We haven't really got a satisfactory anaesthetic, that's the truth of the matter'. They were never sure how much heat the lamp was giving off, although the temperature inside the abdomen was around 130 C. They tied animals down, which is poor practice as if makes monitoring of annaesthetics difficult. Burning of the skin causes skin cells to die, thus depositing their contents (including sugar) in the bloodstream - which probably made the whole experiment pointless.

It was clear that Feldberg was not competent. His eyesight was poor and he had trouble handling syringes. On several occasions he failed in attempts to take blood or administer anaesthetic, and blamed failing sight. His memory had deteriorated. On 15/12/89, he started by injecting a rabbit with Sagatal, yet one minute later could not recall doing so, or what he had intended to do that day. He then inserted a breathing tube into the rabbit, and moments later was found asleep at his desk. When woken he and Stean started heating the rabbit. When asked if the rabbit would cook, Stean said 'It does', and seconds later the rabbit moved visibly in reaction. Stean remarked that he could smell cooking. Soon after they left the rabbit still tied down while they stopped for lunch, after which the rabbit died.

On another occasion heat was applied to a rabbit only 23 seconds after anaesthetic had been injected. The rabbit struggled vigorously, ejecting thermometers aped to the body. Due to previous failed attempts, the ears were then too badly punctured to enable Feldberg to inject more Sagatal. Minutes later, more heat was applied, and the technician noticed that the intestines had become exposed through the broken skin, and were under the heat of the lamp, so pushed them back in.

Feldberg was unaware of how practice should be conducted, and said of the introduction of the 1986 legislation 'I don't know what the changes are'. He was filmed dissecting a cat which had not been killed - his assistant remarked 'Are you doing a live dissection today, Professor ?' He then cut into the cat, causing the cat to struggle, while he pulled out the heart and severed it. Amid this poor practice, Feldberg said 'Either I go on illegally if I am allowed, otherwise I go on illegally if I am not allowed. But go on I will'.

Felberg and Stean handed in their licenses following the exposure of their experiments. The Home Office insisted this was not related to the exposure. Further info: Advocates for Animals, 10 Queensferry Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4PG. One of many undercover investigations.

VIN, P O BOX 223, Camberley, Surrey, GU16 5ZU
 vivisectionkills@hotmail.com

Useful Links:
The Absurdity of Vivisection: :  http://vivisection-absurd.org.uk
Seriously ill against Vivisection:  http://www.siav.org
Americans Europeans Japanese
For Medical Advancement:  http://www.curedisease.com
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine:  http://www.pcrm.org

Reason I read articles posted like this is coz I'm concerned. As said I'm grateful pressure groups make clear that vivisectors are being watched as you have clearly shown individuals do behave badly, just like some doctors behave badly...but we dont stop all doctors. I have never worked in a lab in which anything but the most sensitivity is given to the animals, (I don't work in such labs anymore as I dont like the job and saw an opportunity to work with humans) however the work is necessary. (I should also note I have only ever worked in University labs and have no idea how privatized corporations work... presumably a lot less nicely as the earlier quote that they are only interested in pushing through their investment holds a lot of truth - however I maintain the capitalist society and the use of animals are independent issues).

Yes animal models suck, but not all the time and they suck less the more we work on them and know why they suck. For example the system of the cell is different but the mechanisms of cellular cascades are identical and allow us to figure out correct sequences of events. SImilarly it is the differences between animals and other animals (including humans) which often tell us the most about a problem. Why is one species suceptable but another not? Animal experiments will never be obsolete, we know a lot more about cancer than when the research was started, treatment is far superior and in some cases fully treatable. There is no scientific paper that I know of which is not based on animal studies, no medical practitioners knowledge is not based on heaps of animal studies, to say that the advance since last century is not based on animal studies is illogical and full of holes. Whatever 'one' quack prof, (and there are a lot of quack docs about surely you could find more than one to quote) may say.

If public institutions hadn't beaten Charles Ventner in his rush to privatize the whole genome then the whole genome wouldn't be under public access anymore. You'll not beat the corps if you don't support R&D in the public sector, you'll just fall into slavery quicker.

No time for that shit., sorry.

"Cancer Research" seems to be very well funded at the moment, I've never really understood how they manage to get away with the fear and guilt trips they use in the name of research / fundraising. How many years have they been looking for a cure ?, how much money has been wasted / pocketed ?, how many lives have been ruined ? The CAUSE of cancer is well known - chemical pollution and / or radiation. Stop allegedly looking for a cure, STOP THE CAUSE !