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- The next time you walk the aisles of your neighborhood drugstore take a look at the obscene number of brands for cosmetics, cleaning chemicals, and other items - all unrelated to saving human lives.
- Those beautifully packaged products are on sale because of the torture of literally millions of animals at testing labs, including dogs, monkeys, pigs, rodents, and other sentient, intelligent, sensitive animals.
- The Canadian CTV investigative program W5 just exposed a hidden video taken by a member of LCA - Last Chance for Animals - showing evidence of cruel and often sadistic torture of puppies, pigs and monkeys at the ITR LAB in Montreal.
- That lab is not the only one to use those procedures, of course. Labs like ITR engage in such cruel practices all across the country, and they do it with impunity because the law allows them to. Sadism is an extra, and it also goes unpunished.
- There is no government oversight of their facilities. What goes on in those labs, stays in those labs - unless someone with a hidden camera records those crimes, as was the case of one employee secretly hired by Last Chance for Animals - LCA to infiltrate that lab.
- As you watch this video you will realize that these animals must certainly go mad. They are wired to socialize, to play, to bond and to love other animals and humans.
- As test animals they never get a chance. They are isolated in metal cages, then tied up, restrained, and tortured day after day until their bodies are so ruined that they must be killed. Monkeys live up to 30 years. All other animals don't last more than a few months or a year.
- One cannot even imagine the amount of physical and mental pain they are forced to endure in their lives - all so that the consumers of those products can have shinier hair or a nicer complexion, and the companies selling them can make great profits.
- Canada has the LOWEST standards for the protection of animals in the western world.
Beagle puppies on the way to be processed for torture for the rest of their lives
CHANGE.ORG AND LCA: For four months in 2016, a Last Chance for Animals (LCA) investigator worked at International Toxicology Research Canada (ITR), located in Baie d’Urfe, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal), and documented numerous violations of provincial regulations covering the humane treatment of animals.
One of these victims was Grace, a young macaque monkey who turned in endless circles in her cage and had patches of fur missing from her skin, both signs of severe stress caused by confinement and a lack of any stimulation or socialization with other animals.
When LCA’s investigator pointed these symptoms out to an ITR employee responsible for the animal’s’ daily care, they were instructed not to record Grace’s condition, blatantly disregarding guidelines for the daily assessment of animals in laboratories, which require the measuring of behavioral well-being indicators.
Grace was treated as nothing more than another piece of lab equipment -- but she isn’t. She is a young animal who will be kept alive for years, maybe even decades, her body used in study after study as she suffers the painful effects of the toxins that she is forced to consume, and the isolation, fear, and constant stress that life in a laboratory will mean for her. No animal deserves this treatment. Sadly, Grace was just one of many victims at ITR.
LCA’s investigation also reveals:
- Animals thrown, slammed, suspended by their ears or limbs, and struck with such force that the impact can be heard on the investigator’s recording;
- Open wounds and swollen infections left untreated or inadequately treated;
- Animals subjected to painful and distressing procedures in full view of other animals;
- Beagles and macaques denied any chance of socialization with humans or other animals, and further denied any opportunity to exercise, in some instances for the duration of a nine-month study (at the end of which the animals were killed);
- Macaques denied access to sufficient drinking water;
- Technicians instructed not to take note of hair loss in macaques, despite the hair loss resulting from repetitive behaviors developed through the stress of confinement, and despite guidelines requiring that behavioral well-being indicators be measured;
- Inadequate housing where animals were confined without appropriate bedding or a dry, flat area to rest; where animals were exposed to constant loud noises and harmful levels of gasses due to the build-up of urine and feces behind their cages; and where animals risked being caught in the cages’ wire grilling;
- Beagles unable to ever fully turn around because they were constantly tethered with a catheter inserted between their shoulder blades;
- An anecdotal instance of a macaque left unsupervised while restrained in an inhalation device and subsequently suffocating to death.
The boldness with which many of the instances of abuse took place––often in full view of supervisors and, in the case of beagles in an inhalation study, in a room with a surveillance camera––suggests that technicians were confident they would not be reprimanded for their behavior.
ITR supervisors made no moves to prevent further abuse or to correct systematic neglect of the animals.
Continue reading this article, watch HIDDEN CAMERA VIDEO - and read article by Doctors Against Animal Experimentation explaining why it is not necessary
