1 ECONOMIC WASTE: Government overspending, taxpayer waste, corruption. U.S. government annually spends an estimated $15 to $18 billion on animal research. Yet the animal model renders only 10% of new pharma products “safe” for market.¹ Additionally, National Institutes Of Health (NIH) awards some $2.2 billion in contracts or grants to foreign entities for animal lab projects in 10 countries.² Money is squandered on duplication of the same animal tests. “Right now, the private sector does half as much animal testing as government and taxpayer-funded university labs, but is responsible for 85% of FDA-approved medical innovations. This is just one example of inefficiency and waste in government-funded animal experiments.”³ By some estimates, U.S. agencies exhaust 50% of research funds on old-fashioned animal experiments — even though 89% of animal labs are not reproducible, a basic scientific tenet.⁴

• $3 Million: A decades-long Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison sound localization lab mangles cats to study how human brains process sound. Holes are drilled in a cat's brain to screw in a steel column. A second surgery opens a cat's head to destroy inner ears and lodge electrodes. The cat awakens deaf to undergo drills before killed to dissect her brain. “Funding violent experiments on cats means $3 million less is spent on research to actually improve human health. This can be conducted ethically with sophisticated brain imaging-recording techniques in humans.” Dr. Lawrence Hansen, neuroscience-pathology professor. Top 100 Brain Researchers, Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.⁵


• $5,075,798: Maternal deprivation tests in infant monkeys began (1960s) with Harry Harlow's Well Of Despair. Univ. of Wisconsin still isolates newborns with a live snake or wire “surrogate peer” to simulate adverse rearing conditions. They're further traumatized with human intruder skits, brain scans, spinal taps… that cause infant monkeys to self-mutilate before killed for brain dissection. The mom-baby bond is well-known. Yet studies have endured for a half century+.⁶


• Academic Research: A highly competitive grant culture creates pressure to churn out protocols, regardless of existing data or scientific validity. Schools get grants that help pay for overhead unrelated to labs. Quick money comes from animals, not clinical or cell-line studies. “NIH under-funds patient-oriented research,” with biggest cut for animal studies. Committee On Addressing Career Paths For Clinical Research.⁷


• Big Pharma & Academia, Million-Dollar Alliances: “Big Pharma and an academic institution agree jointly on which projects to fund, and in return for university financing, a company gets first option to commercialize results.”⁸

2 PROGRESS STALLED: Drug recalls, safety risks, no cures. The animal model presumes an effect in one species occurs in another. Yet science says genetic, metabolic, physiological and psychological traits vary significantly from species to species. A drug metabolized in a pig, dog or mouse doesn't look like the same drug in a person. Physiological pathways are unique in each species. In The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation (NIH),⁹ author Aysha Akhtar footnotes myriad treatments that fail in humans due to “disparities between the animal experimental model and the human condition.”¹⁰

BASELINE FOR MEDICAL DEVELOPMENT?
Animal data creates false assumptions that speed new drugs from clinical trials to market, with unforeseen adverse drug reactions.

• Animal stroke experiments don't help humans. A rat, dog or primate can't replicate human physiology. “Accurately modeling disease in animals has proven to be an exercise in futility. Animals don't naturally develop atherosclerosis, a leading contributor to ischemic stroke. Researchers clamp their blood vessels or artificially insert blood clots. These interventions, however, do not replicate the elaborate pathology of atherosclerosis and its underlying causes. The inability to reproduce disease in animals so that it is congruent with human stroke has led to a high failure rate in drug development. Over 114 potential therapies initially tested in animals failed in human trials.”¹¹


• Animal experiments misfire in drug design for cancer, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), traumatic brain injury (TBI), Alzheimer's disease (AD), and inflammatory disorders. For cancer simulation in animals, tumors are unnaturally produced. This prototype can't “mirror the complex process of human carcinogenesis.” Useless or recalled cancer drugs rate among the highest of any disease category.¹²


• Over 20 ALS drugs, tested on animals, collapse in human trials. Riluzole, the sole FDA-approved drug for ALS, “shows notably marginal benefit on patient survival.”¹³ Animal prototypes for Traumatic Brain Injury likewise fail to recreate the intricacy of human TBI. Some 33 drugs appear to help animals artificially wounded in labs. All drugs fail in human trials.¹⁴


• Works in animal experiments: Approx 172 AD34 drugs and 150 inflammatory disease drugs. Fails in human usage: All 322 drugs that were forcibly dosed in animals. Mice, the go-to human disease model, supply 100% inaccurate data for sepsis, burns, trauma. Species discrepancy may render mice useless in cancer and heart disease tests as well. For sepsis (full-body inflammation from infection) investigators find that humans suppress a gene similar to a gene actively used in mice. When researchers disable this gene in lab mice, a test drug is successful. In humans, the same variable increases fatality. Study authors report “failure to block inflammatory responses in critically ill patients” across 150 clinical trials.¹⁵


• Today's drug fail rate hovers around 96%, up from an FDA calculated 92% in 2004. When drugs flop across the disease board, the problem begins with an “inability to adequately model human diseases in animals and the poor predictability of animal models… Lack of effectiveness and safety problems are not predicted by animal tests.”^{16, 17}

EXPERIMENTERS SAY REPETITION = ANSWERS

• Animals exist in perpetual distress from handling, confinement, noise, isolation, pain, fear… Stress hormones influence animal data.¹⁸ Repeating the same experiments again and again, for decades, is a hard sell — given the lack of cures from animals induced with human disease/injury in settings humans never encounter.

ANIMAL STUDIES CAN'T BE REPLICATED

• One study finds 47 of 53 landmark findings can't even be reproduced! “It was shocking. Pharmaceutical industry relies on these findings,” says Glenn Begley, former head of global cancer research at Amgen. Failure is blamed, in part, on animal models irrelevant to diseases, in an arena that fosters poor science, even fraud, as researchers fight for funds.¹⁹

3 HUMANS HARMED: Why do we justify animal cruelty for methods so flawed they even hurt people? The FDA cites Adverse Drug Reactions as the fourth leading cause of U.S. death. In hospitals, some 6.7% of patients experience ADRs, with 0.32% who die. This means over 2,216,000 people annually suffer ADR disability and 106,000 die. As the fourth top cause of death, ADRs surpass pulmonary disease, diabetes, AIDS, pneumonia, accidents, and automobile deaths. These stats don't account for ADRs in ambulatory backdrops or the estimated 350,000 ADRs in U.S. nursing homes each year. A precise ADR stat is unknown. All approved drugs undergo animal tests for “safety and efficacy.”²⁰ Worldwide, ADRs are estimated at fourth to sixth place for cause of death. Animal-tested drugs now compete with heart disease, cancer and stroke — the very diseases they seek to cure — in “prevalent causes of mortality.”²¹

BIG BLUNDERS: WHEN DRUGS ENDANGER
When animal data misinforms, humans suffer. “Animal toxicity studies are poor predictors of toxic effects of drugs in humans.”²²

• After decades and vast sums are spent on animal experimentation for HIV/AIDS vaccines, infamously on chimpanzees, all 90 animal-studied vaccines prove ineffectual in humans. Author Aysha Akhtar argues in her NIH article that “the implicit assumption that primate (and indeed any animal) data are reliable leads to significant and unjustifiable human suffering. Clinical trial volunteers for (HIV vaccine) gp120 were placed at unnecessary risk of harm.”^{23, 9}


• When menopausal women on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) join the largest randomized study to date (1998-2002 Women's Health Initiative WHI)²⁴, participants see a spike in coronary heart disease and breast cancer. The data triggers anxiety in HRT users and new restrictive prescriptions. WHI, along with another HRT study, abruptly end due to elevated stroke and breast cancer risk, undetected in animal tests.²⁵


• Elan Pharmaceuticals abruptly ends a Phase 2 clinical trial after an Alzheimer's Disease vaccine induces brain swelling in humans. During animal experiments on GM mice and primates, no harmful impacts are observed. ²⁶


• Volunteers dosed with TGN 1412, a drug to dampen the immune system, suffer grave (organ failure, brain edema) and permanent effects in under two hours, some in minutes. No ill effects are seen when tested in mice, rabbits, rats, Cynomolgus and rhesus monkeys. Monkeys endure lethal-dose toxicity tests, given 500 times the human dose.²⁷ None show the instant catastrophic reactions observed in humans who get minute doses. “If experimentation using chimps and other nonhuman primates, our closest genetic cousins, are unreliable, how can we expect other animals to be reliable? The bottom line is that animal experiments, no matter the species, are highly unreliable — and have too little predictive value to justify the resultant risks of harms for humans,” concludes author Aysha Akhtar in her NIH National Library Of Medicine report.⁹

BAD ANIMAL DATA CANCELS DRUGS THAT COULD SAVE PEOPLE
Valuable therapeutics for humans are discarded if unsuccessful in animals. “Treatments that fail to work or show some adverse effect in animals may be abandoned in preclinical testing even if they may have proved effective and safe in humans if allowed to continue through the drug development pipeline.”⁹

• Among 5,000–10,000 possible therapies studied in animals, just 5 or so make it to Phase 1 clinical trials. Pharma data is non-public, so the breadth of lost chances is unknown.²⁸


• Tamoxifen, a crucial breast cancer drug, “would most certainly have been withdrawn from the pipeline if its propensity to cause liver tumor in rats had been discovered in preclinical testing rather than after the drug had been on the market for years.”²⁹


• A drug for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) displays grave repurcussions in 5 species, with dogs who suffer acute liver malfunction. Liver damage does not occur in human cell assays. Clinical trials affirm the drug for human use, despite toxicity in animals.¹⁶ While leukemia patients luck out with a drug greenlit via human-based tests, others aren't as lucky. Common drugs such as aspirin (embryo toxicity in rats, rhesus monkeys), Tylenol (poisonous in dogs, cats) and penicillin (deadly in guinea pigs) might not exist if discovered under modern animal-test rules.^{30, 47}


• Cyclosporine to treat autoimmune disease and deter organ transplant rejection, plus more pivotal drugs such as aripiprazole (Abilify) and esomeprazole (Nexium), are delayed or forfeited when animal findings show low viability. A PharmaInformatic report asks: How many other blockbuster drugs would be on the market today, if preselect compounds and drug-candidates didn't rely on animal tests?³¹ “These near-missed opportunities and the overall 96% failure rate in clinical drug testing strongly suggest the unsoundness of animal testing and provide powerful evidence for the need for a new, human-based paradigm in medical research… Repeatedly, researchers are lured down the wrong line of investigation from animal experiments that later prove to be inaccurate, irrelevant, or discordant with human biology.”⁹

BROKEN SYSTEM
Experimenters claim to extract some valid knowledge from animals because they are live beings. Yet if the science is fundamentally unreliable, with potential to harm humans, why do we defend a system that is inherently cruel? It's futile to debate experimenters themselves. In the lab, animals are viewed as a means to an end. Experimenters see themselves as “heroes” with noble careers. I.E., one told me I am not qualified to recognize animal cruelty, and thus my evidence is invalid. They speak condescendingly and paint anyone against the use of animals in research as an extremist.