Posted on the 7th September 2011
Following publication of an NOP poll, which revealed that 82 per cent of respondents would not ‘knowingly donate to a medical research or health charity that funds experiments on animals’ (see Notes), Animal Aid has posted 40 billboards in prominent central London locations that ‘name and shame’ Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, Parkinson’s UK and the Alzheimer’s Society as research charities that fund animal experiments.
The six-by-four-foot telephone kiosk messages are the latest initiative in Animal Aid’s Victims of Charity campaign that was launched in June. The billboards will be followed by national newspaper advertisements later this month. The campaign exposes the appallingly cruel animal research funded by the four charities, and calls for the public to withhold from them all financial support until they switch to humane, non-animal methods of research.
Animal Aid’s Victims of Charity scientific report describes experiments in which charity-funded researchers deliberately damaged monkeys’ brains with toxic chemicals, slowly and systematically destroyed the hearts of dogs, and injected mice with cancerous tissue. The report’s authors conclude that laboratory experiments on animals produce information that cannot be reliably applied to human medicine – and can even be dangerously misleading.
Says Animal Aid’s Director, Andrew Tyler:
‘It seems clear from a new NOP poll commissioned by Animal Aid that an overwhelming majority of the respondents have no idea that money they donate to household-name medical research charities is being used – against their wishes – to fund animal experiments. Our new “name-and-shame” billboards and national newspaper adverts will expose that truth to millions of people. The charities concerned really do need to listen to the people on whom they depend for their financial wellbeing. Animal experiments not only cause terrible suffering, they fail human patients too, because of problems of applying animal data to human medicine. There are so many excellent non-animal research methods now available, there can be no justification for not wholeheartedly embracing them.’
See photos of the billboards, their locations and the original artwork below.
Download Victims of Charity. A hard copy is available on request.
Commissioned by Animal Aid, the GfK NOP poll fieldwork was carried out between August 19 and 21, 2011. A total of 1000 respondents – weighted for sex, age, social class and geographical region – were questioned. When asked: Would you knowingly donate to a medical research or health charity that funds experiments on animals, or not? an overwhelming 82 per cent of total respondents answered ‘No’. Just 16 per cent answered ‘Yes’, with 2 per cent falling into the ‘Don’t know’ category.
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