Twenty-First-Century Science
TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION OF a different type can solve the most complicated issues of animal welfare, and nowhere are the stakes higher than in animal testing. For more than a half century, chemicals have been routinely and deliberately put into the eyes, skin, stomach, and lungs of rodents, rabbits, dogs, and other animals in a misguided attempt to assess the safety of drugs, cosmetics, industrial chemicals, and other products.
Estimates are that ten to twenty million animals are used globally in toxicity testing alone, and this number could increase dramatically given legislative mandates for ever more chemicals to be tested, all of it ostensibly for the public good. Partly because of the suffering they endure—the animals are rarely given the benefit of pain relief—testing of this kind has been a defining issue for the modern animal-protection movement. The cruelty of toxicity testing has inspired legislative campaigns and consumer boycotts, prompting progressive companies to forswear animal testing and to use “No Animal Testing” branding on their products.
Animal testing is a classic case of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. On the one hand, toxicity information is needed to judge the safety of chemicals and products. However, while poisoning animals might tell us a lot about how large doses of single chemicals affect small animals with short life spans, it is of little use in determining how low levels of exposure to mixtures of chemicals affect larger, longer-living human beings. A rat force-fed a chemical for his or her entire life—often causing painful symptoms such as tumors and organ failure—does not reliably predict the effects of chemicals ingested by you and me.
As one might expect, the relevance of animal test results is often challenged (remember the legal battles over whether cigarette smoking causes cancer?), leading to endless disputes over the data and to unyielding misery for animals in laboratories. Even under optimum conditions, regulating chemicals on the basis of animal data takes years and relies on guesswork. A report by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates that new drug candidates have only an 8 percent chance of reaching the market, in large part because animal studies so often “fail to predict the specific safety problem that ultimately halts development.” Even Francis Collins, now head of the National Institutes of Health, told reporters that animal testing can be problematic for a number of reasons: “It’s slow. It’s expensive. We are not rats and we are not even other primates.”
We are left to wonder why a practice so suspect is nevertheless treated by the scientific establishment as the sine qua non of safety testing. And often the answer may be simple inertia—the settled ways of people locked in a routine and going along with the crowd. Though one would expect scientists to be inquisitive and skeptical, few who conduct animal testing ever get around to asking themselves the most basic of questions: Why are we really doing this, and is it really doing any good?
Sometimes it’s the person at the top who thinks to ask it. Not long ago, I spoke to my friend Bill Nicholson, who for years was the man at the top of Amway, the sales and manufacturing giant known for its multilevel marketing programs of cosmetics and other household products. Like so many other companies, Amway conducted toxicity testing for its products.
Two decades ago, Nicholson, a brilliant businessman and now a devoted animal advocate, decided he no longer wanted his company’s products to be dripped into rabbits’ eyes or force-fed to mice and rats. He called Greg Grochowski, the company’s director of research and development, and asked him why the company conducted animal tests. It was done to protect the company from legal claims against it, Greg told him, and not because the company wanted to do it or because the government required it. “I want to be out of the animal-testing business within 40 days,” Bill declared in response.
Greg heeded the message and wasted no time in hiring additional staff to pull reports and studies showing that the ingredients in Amway’s products had already been safety tested. They had to hunt high and low for the information, but the exercise proved that the safety tests had already been conducted. The Amway products would be safe, Greg reasoned, if each of the ingredients had already been deemed safe. Greg put an end to animal testing within the forty-day period—a time frame he and others would have thought impossible, until he was told to do it.
Amway was hardly the first, but it was one of the biggest companies at the time to halt the animal testing of its products and to seek out other ways of ensuring product safety. John Paul Mitchell Systems, The Body Shop, and Tom’s of Maine had already sworn off animal testing, as hundreds of other companies have done since (all of them listed in the LeapingBunny.org directory of cruelty-free cosmetics and products). Even now, however, many of the largest cosmetic and consumer product companies in the world still have not kicked their animal-testing habit.
For nearly twenty-five years, European law has required the use of alternative, nonanimal methods when available. Yet here in the United States, federal lawmakers have so far refused to follow suit, or even to take such basic steps as prohibiting duplicative testing or requiring companies to share existing test data. The Animal Welfare Act calls for basic care standards for animals used in testing, which offers some comfort until you recall that this law does not even cover the use of lab-bred mice, rats, or birds, even though they comprise more than 95 percent of warm-blooded animals used in experiments.
The HSUS policy on animal testing is centered on the “Three Rs”—refining techniques to eliminate pain and distress, reducing the number of animals in protocols, and ultimately replacing the use of animals altogether—an approach first laid out in 1959 by the English scientists William Russell and Rex Burch. This struck me as the right way to address the issue, rejecting complacency about animal use while striking a practical note about getting companies steeped in the world of animal testing to themselves commit to a plan to find their way out of it.
For years, our HSUS board of directors was led by a medical doctor, David Wiebers, a neurologist then at the Mayo Clinic, and our current vice chair is also a medical doctor, Jennifer Leaning, who has long taught at the Harvard School of Public Health. Their presence has blunted the argument thrown at animal advocates that we were hostile to science or public health and safety. Our line of argument is clear: there are moral, financial, and public health costs to the use of animals, and we should all agree that phasing out and ultimately eliminating such use is in everybody’s interest.
Some companies, including consumer product giants Procter & Gamble and Unilever, have invested tens of millions in alternatives development, and other companies are now doing the same. In 2008, in response to a campaign by Humane Society International, the European Union committed to an aggressive timetable for adoption of scientifically proven nonanimal methods as they become available. In fact, EU member countries overwhelmingly adopted the nonanimal skin irritation tests as full and complete replacements to the use of animals. It’s now just a matter of time before the animal-based skin test becomes a thing of the past in Europe. Since that requirement affects the practices of so many multinational corporations, operating in both Europe and America, it’s safe to say they will adopt a uniform policy modeled on Europe’s reforms.
The large companies that account for most testing can also see the stirrings of change in America, if they are paying attention. The most hopeful sign came with a 2007 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: A Vision and Strategy. That report laid out a long-term proposal for shifting largely, if not entirely, to nonanimal testing methods for chemicals, drugs, and consumer products. The new approach, drawn from the deliberations of an expert committee, relies on modern advances in biology and technology and emphasizes human—rather than animal—biology. Some experts believe the proposed research and development can be completed within a decade, though funding from Congress and industry will be needed to meet this objective.
Instead of observing signs of severe sickness or death in chemically overdo
sed animals, the strategy proposed by the NAS is to study how chemicals interact with cellular “pathways” in the human body at environmentally relevant doses. The strategy involves looking individually at the various cell types in the human body (brain, skin, lung, liver, etc.). Each type is individually tested in a cell culture for different kinds of toxic response. To reconstruct the whole-body scenario again, highly sophisticated computer-based approaches, called “systems biology” and “pharmacokinetic models,” are used. These relate toxicity information at the cellular level to expected real-world conditions for a living, breathing human being.
To evaluate the cancer-causing potential of a single chemical in a conventional animal test takes up to five years, eight hundred animals, and upwards of $4 million. For the same price and without any use of animals, as many as 350 chemicals could be tested in less than one week in two hundred different cell or gene tests using a high throughput, robot-automated approach. If we are ever to clear the current backlog of literally thousands of chemicals with little or no safety data in order to properly protect human health and the environment, we need credible tests that can deliver results in days, not years.
Cutting-edge scientific work is already under way worldwide to develop the next generation of nonanimal testing methods. More than $250 million in alternatives research funding has already been provided by the EU, with an additional $30–50 million being invested per year by multinational companies. The EU has also provided funding for an ambitious Humane Society–led initiative called “AXLR8,” which aims to coordinate worldwide research in this area to help accelerate the transition to a future in which safety testing is animal-free.
In the United States, we have been successful in helping to secure federal funding for alternatives, and “Tox 21”—an interagency collaboration among the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Toxicology Program, the Chemical Genomics Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration. Through this endeavor, scientists are identifying key cellular pathways in humans, and using high-throughput cell tests to rate hazardous chemicals. We are also pursuing an international strategy for broad, regulatory acceptance of these new approaches as soon as possible. At the same time, we’ve helped persuade a few states to adopt reforms modeled on the EU’s requirement to use alternatives wherever they exist—which is not only good in itself, but also shows the way for Congress.
So, with respect to toxicity testing, the key question is: Do we have the will to achieve the goal of total replacement in ten to fifteen years or will it take decades? To achieve this goal without more years of delay, and millions more animals sacrificed, we need something akin to the Human Genome Project, with a total budget of several hundred million dollars per year and a focused and coordinated research-and-development program.
We should work together—government, industry, and advocates—to find a way out of this morass of animal testing. Continuing to treat animals as “guinea pigs,” even in the face of evidence that the results are of limited value to human safety and even knowing the enormous costs in dollars and innocent lives, is a fool’s errand. It is a twentieth-century approach to public health, discredited by serious science as much as by clear moral reasoning, and human creativity and ingenuity can show us a better way in the twenty-first century. If those qualities of genius belong anywhere, they belong in the realm of science. Applied to the great mission of freeing us from the use of animals, they can make modern science a powerful force for the humane economy, instead of just a drag upon it.
Innovation and the Spark of Life
PEOPLE CAN SURPRISE YOU, and I’ve learned over the years that sometimes the best allies can be your former adversaries. It’s a rare thing to meet someone who doesn’t feel some measure of concern or sympathy for animals, or at least the occasional moment of doubt about the cruelties committed at their expense. We’re a cause made up of converts; the doors of this movement are open to anyone whose heart and mind leads them inside.
And sometimes the least likely people take you up on the invitation. Such is the pull of our bond with animals that now and then you come across someone who has every reason to turn away from the cause, yet somehow still answers the call. I think of Chuck Anderson, a fellow you wouldn’t expect to care much for wildlife and for sharks in particular. If anyone is entitled to despise these creatures, or even to wish them misfortune, it would be Chuck, who encountered a shark in June of 2000.
He was swimming in the warm waters off the coast of Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico when a bull shark suddenly attacked. No dolphins around this time: it was just Chuck and the shark. He tried to fend off the animal, but its first bite took off four of his fingers. The shark then spun around and aimed for Chuck’s midsection—this time doing little damage. The third and final bite was the worst, severing Chuck’s arm below the elbow. The shark then retreated and disappeared, and Chuck struggled to shore, grievously wounded. Bleeding profusely, he went into shock. He was saved only by some fast-working medics, and in the end he felt lucky that he lost only a limb.
Nine years after the attack, in July 2009, Chuck and eight other shark attack victims made the unlikeliest trek. They went to Capitol Hill to ask Congress to halt the needless killing of sharks. Specifically, they made the case for a ban on shark finning—the practice of catching sharks, cutting off their dorsal fins, and then dumping their bleeding bodies in the ocean. All of this to make shark fin soup, considered a delicacy by tens of millions of Chinese. Every year close to a hundred million sharks are killed for their fins, causing untold cruelty and devastation to the many species worldwide.
If it takes a big man to lose an arm to a shark and still rise in opposition to the wrongs done to these creatures, what are we to say of people who perpetuate such cruelties, all for a bowl of soup? I wouldn’t necessarily quarrel with people harboring ill will toward animals who had attacked them. But the sight of these men and women championing the cause of animals, in spite of bitter experiences, is an exceptional expression of human altruism. They didn’t blame sharks for the harm they suffered; they traveled the path from forgiveness to advocacy. And their example is more than a witness to Congress, it is a witness to all of us—showing the human capacity to look beyond ourselves and find goodness in all creatures.
This story is unusual in degree, but I’ve seen the same spirit in action all my adult life, in the company of people who take up the cause of the defenseless. And though the issues and arguments have changed over the years, the basic convictions have endured. At its best, the cause of animal protection is one of the more altruistic concerns you’ll find. It’s a cause that arises from some of the best instincts of humanity. It reminds us that animals have claims of their own in the world. They are not just here to be used and killed. They are not just things, or resources, or commodities, or targets, or economic opportunities in the waiting. Animals have the same spark of life that we have, formed from the same dust of the earth. They want to live just as badly as we do. Often, they experience life as we do. They can feel playful or angry, affectionate or afraid, sad or joyful.
In the end, the case for animals arises from the recognition of these qualities, and from the sense of kinship they instill. The case stands on its merits and needs no other concerns or connections to give it importance. Yet today, more than ever, there is indeed a close connection between cruelty and other pressing social concerns, and that reinforces the case for animal protection in the modern era and makes it relevant to every one of us.
No longer are the consequences of cruelty confined to its intended victims. So many troubles in the world can be traced in part to the abuse of animals. If climate change is a matter that concerns you, then the environmental costs of raising sixty billion animals for food—more and more of them on factory farms—also warrant your urgent attention. If the spread of disease and the danger of pandemics are a threat, then we have to get serious about stemming the exotic animal trade, the global cockfighting su
bculture, and mass-confinement methods of producing poultry—since these industries are incubators of diseases that can jump from animals to people. If you wonder about domestic abuse or violent crime in our communities, then look no further than how people get started. Often it begins with the abuse of animals and the loss of empathy.
Civilized societies have always known that to abuse any animal is wrong. Yet civilized societies have always tolerated various forms of animal abuse. In the slow and halting progress of humanity, we too often resist change and defend what we’ve become accustomed to. Every age has its terrible blind spots, its massive moral lapses, and this is one that we must overcome in our age. We have exhibited such incredible ingenuity in building systems of exploitation—now we must use that same gift to replace them with the new systems of a humane economy. We need laws, and standards, and clear, bright lines to halt cruelty and abuse. It is for us to exercise restraint, because in our dealings with other animals, there is an asymmetry in power. We are entirely in control, and how we use our power is an important measure of our character and our own lives.
No matter what the reform up for debate, we will always hear from those skeptics who warn of the radical implications of change—and in a way, they are right. There is always something a little radical when we dare to live up to our own beliefs. We deal with those skeptics all the time in our work at HSUS. And apart from their cynicism, what always strikes me the most is the static nature of the arguments that our opponents make. They cling to old ways and old traditions as if nothing is ever allowed to change, no matter the costs or the harm.
The sealers in Atlantic Canada talk as if life could not go on without forever clubbing and killing newborn seal pups. And as soon as one reason for the slaughter is disproved, they’ll quickly pick up another. They don’t care that the world is moving on. They just want to keep things exactly as they are. It’s the same with the whalers in Japan and Norway. They know that whale watching is a potentially more lucrative and sustainable source of revenue, but they don’t want to hear it and they don’t want to change. They just want to go on killing, and without international action they would stay at it and haul in and carve up thousands of whales, even the rarest. The same is true of so many of the other interests and industries we contend with at the HSUS—the fur farmers and the trappers, the horse slaughter plants and the killer buyers, the trophy hunters, the animal-testing lobby, the cockfighters, and on and on. They all want to live in a static world, doing the same thing, in the same way, forever.
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