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Who is fooling
who?
It is a sad fact that some
organizations claiming to care about the environment and
wildlife not only support, but actively promote the
poisoning of animals in
cruel and useless laboratory toxicity tests. Three
environmental organizations in particular—Environmental Defense,
the National Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife
Fund—actively lobby for more animal-testing*
and have caused
major setbacks in the development and acceptance of non-animal
test methods. For example:
The World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) was largely responsible for initiating,
and has been one of the chief architects in designing, the EPA’s
notorious Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP). The
purpose of the EDSP is to screen thousands of chemicals to
detect endocrine (hormone) disrupting effects, even though
scientists have been unable to even define what an “endocrine
disruptor” is or does. However, as a result of lobbying by the
WWF and others, the EDSP has become the largest animal-testing
program of all time, with the potential to kill as many as 100
million animals.
The Natural Resources Defense
Council (NRDC) has
aggressively lobbied the EPA to initiate several large
animal-testing initiatives. Dissatisfied with the rate at which
the EDSP was being developed, the NRDC filed a lawsuit in an
attempt to force the EPA to begin the testing process
sooner—without properly validating the animal tests that would
be used—and has fought every attempt by PETA to ensure that
animal tests undergo the same scientific scrutiny as their
non-animal counterparts. The NRDC also coordinated a joint
letter calling on the EPA to require that all pesticides undergo
developmental neurotoxicity testing on animals. The nonvalidated
developmental neurotoxicity test kills between 1,200 and 2,500
animals every time it is performed. In addition, EPA officials
have admitted that they don’t even know how to interpret the
results of
Environmental Defense was one of
the chief architects, and is largely responsible for initiating,
EPA’s notorious high production volume (HPV) chemical testing
program. The HPV program was created to pressure chemical
manufacturers to test (or retest) thousands of chemicals using a
“checklist” approach that relies on numerous crude, painful, and
uninformative animal tests. Environmental Defense opposed the
incorporation of non-animal tests into the program. Even though
the animal protection community has reviewed and commented on
every proposed HPV test plan in an attempt to limit the number
of animal tests performed, Environmental Defense has only
commented on a small handful of HPV test plans. Yet in virtually
all cases, Environmental Defense has called for more animal
tests, even on substances well known to be blinding and
corrosive.
While some environmental
organizations recognize the futility of trying to manage
dangerous chemicals by relying on endless animal-testing, these
organizations insist on throwing more and more animal tests at
every problem.
PETA
knows
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