Our founder, Rebecca Groves, is a very inspiring 27 year old young lady who has multiple sclerosis. Rebecca’s life is constantly enriched and uplifted by the devoted companionship of her gorgeous Jack Russel dog, Patch, and Rebecca also always buys Cruelty Free products. So this post about Cruelty Free International’s (CFI) misleading statements about medical science is not published lightly.
CFI are asking people to help fund their court case against the Govt.’s decision to allow B&K Universal’s beagle breeding unit to keep dogs indoors – this is a moral issue about animals not being given access to outside runs. However, CFI do not limit their evidence to animal cruelty issues and have, much to our great sadness and alarm, published false statements about science on their website and in The Times to support their court case, details below:
The Govt. falsely argue that infections, which may be caught by dogs spending time in outside runs, would impact on their ability to predict the responses of human patients and ‘could potentially invalidate any experiment they are used in’. CFI respond by stating the opposite, that there’s ‘greater risk of experiments being distorted if dogs were kept indoors”. Both positions are medically false, and cloud the very grave medical truth that such animal experiments are now already proven to be entirely invalid for human medical research; please visit our science Board for more on this.
It is solely up-to-date medical understanding – about crucial differences in evolutionary biology, which have evolved over millions of years – that now invalidates the continued use of cruel experiments on animals, falsely claimed able to ‘predict’ the responses of human patients. This scientific fact has absolutely nothing to do with whether dogs have access to the outside, or if they are kept indoors. To be perfectly honest we are surprised that CFI is serious about asking for donations to fund a court action based on the outside run issue, but we will be keeping a close eye on developments and will comment where appropriate.
The experts who represent us are the foremost in their field, and their position, thankfully, is increasingly becoming the focus of leading scientific journals, including the British Medical Journal which published its Editor’s Choice in June 2014, titled ‘How Predictive and Productive is Animal Research?’ (the full article is available here ). You can listen to the president of our medical Board, Dr Ray Greek, testifying at an EU Parliament science hearing earlier this year, below:
Please click on the image below to type in your post code and ask your MP to sign Parliamentary EDM 373. This EDM has been tabled by Kelvin Hopkins MP and calls for properly moderated public scientific debates about the false claims that animal models are able to ‘predict’ the responses of human patients. These science debate hearings have conditions endorsed by Britain’s foremost human rights defence barrister Michael Mansfield QC, and will be overseen by independent judges from the scientific community.
