Imagine this: You’re on a road trip with friends. Suddenly, there’s a bright flash, an unfamiliar noise, and darkness. You wake up in a cold steel room surrounded by figures you don’t recognize, and then the pain begins.
These figures shove tubes up your nose and down your throat, force you to inhale substances, burn you, cut you, and implant objects in your skull—and for the rest of your life, they confine you to a barren cage barely bigger than your own body.
For the millions of animals in laboratories, this nightmare is real.
Right now, dogs, cats, monkeys, rats, mice, birds, and other animals in college and university laboratories are being mutilated, poisoned, deprived of food and water, forcibly immobilized in restraint devices, infected with painful and deadly diseases, burned, electrocuted, irradiated, addicted to drugs, and psychologically tortured. Yet 90% of basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans.