When dogs and cats are stolen, discarded or given away to city and county animal pounds or shelters they may end up donated to medical school students who practice surgery on them or sold to researchers who torture them testing the latest cosmetics, personal care products, household cleaning products and so forth. Today, too many medical schools still believe that cruelty to animals is somehow essential to becoming a doctor yet only 21 out of 126 U.S. medical schools have student medical labs that continue to conduct science on living animals.
The other 105 medical schools practice responsible, moral and ethical medicine through computer simulation exercises that do not traumatize and kill healthy animals and discarded pets. Federal or state research regulators typically are not allowed to see what really goes on during experiments. Critics charge they do not want to know what really happens behind closed doors at animal research facilities similar to zoos not wanting to know what ever happens to the unwanted zoo animals they send off to auction.
Regulators are accused of routinely refusing to enforce the U.S. Animal Welfare Act just like they are accused of refusing to enforce it at factory-farm animal slaughterhouses too because, as one inspector testified, federal and/or state research inspectors may not always take the Animal Welfare Act or those who register animal welfare complaints seriously. Why? They’re just animals!
The animals and discarded pets often used in research include dogs, cats, monkeys and even pigs. For example, on a typical day lab students and/or research workers were secretly videotaped grabbing animals and choking them so they can stuff tubes down their throats or down their noses in order to fill the animal up with high doses of chemicals or drugs to cause toxic reactions, illness or death. Of course, the animals squeal, fight and vomit during this process. Once painful procedures are performed the animals are forever fearful and now the animals never cooperate so they may be taunted, cursed at, punched in the face, squeezed by the neck and slammed against walls or tied down not to mention it all may take place in full view of other animals.
Some research lab environments also have rock music constantly blaring. Of course, all these questionable procedures may cause injury in the process, like ruptured sinuses, as well as ulcerated wounds to their vital internal organs, rectal prolapses, which are painful protrusions of the intestines through the rectum, caused due to constant stress and diarrhea. Self-mutilation may be common due to failure to provide veterinary care or provide psychological enrichment and socialization because no one may ever come
over to their cold, barren steel cage unless it is to conduct some horrific act on them.
Once injuries and sickness take hold and the animal is unable to heal it may stop eating and drinking causing it to suffer a slow and painful death unless the animal can be re-cycled into new torturous experiments. It may not always be necessary to experiment only on a healthy animal. For example, an unhealthy animal’s eyes can still be “burned out” and blinded to test some cosmetic or household chemical. Sometimes student and worker lab technicians may do things to the animals because it is easier on them even though it is more painful and injurious to the animal since, in the long run, no one really cares about the animals.
At some point in the experimentation process the reaction in the animals may be that their skin starts to flake off and their hair may fall out. They may also become neurotic, like running in circles, or lifeless and still denied veterinary treatment including euthanasia even after months and months of neglect. Then one day the animal or discarded pet may likely be found dead in their cage! Think about this next time you give away a pet to someone you do not know or ask animal control to take your pet away.
SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCES: ANIMAL TIMES MAGAZINE SUMMER 2005 and PHYSICIANS COMMITTEE FOR RESPONSIBLE MEDICINE NEWS (PCRM) JULY 2005 and ANIMAL PEOPLE NEWS JULY 2005