Only give to humane medical charities, and this way animals won’t suffer, and we will find cures to disease much faster. The big conventional charities continue to receive millions of pounds in donations, which are often used for TV adverts to convince the general public that donating to them is to the only way to ‘beat cancer or heart disease’. These terrible diseases are not fights, they are a range of illnesses that can often be prevented through a change in lifestyle (which is often due to government failures: lack of clean air, walking/cycling paths).
But many of the solutions can be found much quicker with humane research, which means using modern effective and kind methods to cure disease. Humane research is even cheaper, which begs the question as to why so many animals continue to suffer unnecessarily, in vivisection laboratories. The US are way ahead here, with vivisection labs gradually closing down. They even have a logo that you can look for, to ensure that the charity you donate to is free from animal testing. Beagle Freedom Project rescues dogs that have been used in labs, to adopt to loving homes. They go wild, when they tread on grass for the first time!
Only Give to Humane Charities
The UK has four main humane research charities. All of these use donations to fund clever boffins in universities and medical schools to find cures for disease. Animals are a very poor model choice, and have delayed many findings in recent years, as well as causing considerable stress and pain. These charities use a blend of modern methods including human volunteers, computer modelling, test tubes and magnetic resonance imaging (examining the brain). They also work with cadavers (donated dead bodies) and use population studies. Here are the main charities to switch your donations to (a few sell nice Christmas cards):
VERO (Voice for Ethical Research at Oxford) is one of the main voices against experiments being carried out in universities (including Open University). This outfit is run by expert academics, who know their science.
Human Relevant Science has an all-party group of MPs interested in replacing animals with modern human-based methods. Ask your MP if he or she is a member. And if not, why not?
Donate Your Body to Science
Human Tissue Authority has full information on donating your body, tissues, bone marrow and blood. Cadavers are essential to help cure disease. This includes healthy tissue (for example, someone examining Parkinson’s would need a healthy brain to compare).
Could Vaccines Have Been Quicker?
Here is some food for thought. If humane research is kinder, quicker, more effective and cheaper, why did the big medical research institutions still model on animals to find a vaccine? We do not yet know for sure how the virus started, but many believe that people eating wild animals has created zoonotic diseases (where virus transfer from species to another). So considering all the previous horror stories of animal lab tests going wrong, not one person in the media has questioned why we modelled the ‘cure’ on the same premise.
If humane research works better for finding cures to illness, it would make sense that now was the time to test this theory on the greater general public. Senior research scientist Dr Jarrod Bailey writes that considering the trials have gone straight to humans in some cases, this proves that animals are not needed.
Animal Free Research UK worked on a COVID-19 test (which unlike the present ones) was kind and humane to all species. But unlike the big charities, it received little publicity and fewer donations. By using human tissue samples, Lorna and her team also made the research more relevant to humans, as they can detected the exact number of copies of active viral particles in a sample. Who knows if the vaccine could have arrived quicker, if government had supported them too?
