Our friends at Animal Partisan have pulled another victim of animal research from the shadows, casting metaphorical sunlight upon both his face and the shamefully bad “science” for which he was exploited. 

Our victim, a male ferret whose face peeks out through the metal bars of his bare cell, is recorded drinking from a newly-filled receptacle for more than three minutes straight after being found without access to water.

He was recorded at the University of Alabama-Birmingham (“UAB”), which has a long history of failing to provide the most minimal of legally-mandated care to the other-than-human animals it exploits for profit. 

We cannot be certain what this poor boy endured before going thirsty, but we can take an educated guess: using animal research industry parlance, UAB probably “smoked” him.

We all now know that cigarette smoking leads to illness and death, but that hasn’t stopped animal research facilities like UAB from raking in federal dollars to “study[] the effects of tobacco smoke on [nonhuman] animals”. 

Nonhuman animals do not, of course, voluntarily smoke human cigarettes; but, then again, animal researchers never allow facts to stand in the way of their paydays. Rather, they seek to justify and distract from their torture-for-profit racket by hollowly claiming that their work will help humans. And, at UAB, this claim has long given a nod to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (“COPD”).

COPD, “an umbrella term used to describe progressive lung disease, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis”, represents the third most common cause of death in the U.S. COPD provides a superficial but soundbite-worthy bridge between animal research and human health because an estimated 25% of human smokers will develop COPD. 

So, then, because one-in-four voluntary human smokers may develop COPD:

UAB researchers force ferrets to “smoke” cigarettes by cramming them into “exposure tubes” fitted with “custom-designed [] exposure system[s]” that blast cigarette smoke up their noses and into their lungs as often as twice a day for months-on-end. 

Ferrets in these experiments undergo tremendous stress and suffering, even being categorized by UAB as among the victims of the most painful (i.e., “Column E”) experiments. 

In addition to living in barren metal cages when not being forced into filthy plastic tubes (that contain “ferret hair, what appears to be dried saliva and a thick yellowish brown resident”), ferrets subjected to these experiments suffer worse than the “labored breathing and coughing” specified by UAB. They endure bronchitis, bronchiolitis, symptoms suggestive of emphysema, and “fatal respiratory infections, with fever, respiratory distress, reduced feeding, weight loss, and physical inactivity”. And, that’s if they survive the experiments: ferrets at UAB have repeatedly nearly or actually died from unintentional asphyxiation when researchers failed to monitor them properly during the experiments. (If they make it through all of this, intentional killing by exsanguination awaits them.)

For what do these sentient beings suffer? According to even researchers themselves, that would be bad “science” that does not help human sufferers of COPD.

➤  Researchers admit that their experimental design is flawed. For one thing, “COPD develops and is slowly progressive over many years”, such that the way COPD is initiated in animal experiments “bears little resemblance to its natural counterpart in humans.”: while recognizing that “[c]ontinous, long-term exposure to cigarette smoke” is the COPD risk factor at issue, researchers use ferrets blasted with cigarette smoke twice daily for several months as stand-ins for “10 pack-years of smoking” for humans. For another thing, the animals used tend to be “young, healthy males”, who “obviously” do not mirror “the case for human patients”. And, for yet another, there is no standardization between similar experimental protocols or methods among different laboratories, resulting in the “serious problem” of “laboratory-to-laboratory variations”:  “[e]ven when the same mouse strain is used, different laboratories get quite different degrees of disease.”

➤  Researchers admit that “insurmountable species differences” make it impossible for ferrets (or other nonhuman animals) to “model” human COPD. Per researchers, lungs of different species – and often even different members of the same species – develop and mature differently, differ anatomically, and differ in their susceptibility to “injurious agents”, like cigarette smoke; and, despite a “variety of widely different types of animal models” of COPD, “all have problems” and “none . . . irrespective of the mechanisms employed to initiate disease, accurately describe the human situation” (i.e.,“no matter how long animals are smoked . . . the disease they produce is mild” – failing to “reflect the variable pathology and different stages of COPD severity in humans” and mirroring “only a few (but not all) characteristic features of human COPD”). Importantly, researchers have even acknowledged that – because the development of COPD “depends on the [individual] patient’s susceptibility” (afterall, only about 25% of smokers develop the disease) and because “there is considerable human to human variation in the pattern of COPD” – humans cannot even model the disease for one another.

➤  Researchers admit that, regardless of the above and the proven inability of nonhuman animal “models” of COPD to lead to human treatments, researchers continue to over-rely on “animal models” instead of developing “a better understanding of the natural (human) progression” of the disease. Though, they say, the development of non-animal models has significant potential to “lead to the better diagnosis of different types of [] COPD, allow better monitoring of the disease, provide tools for more targeted research into disease mechanisms, and ultimately assist the development of personalized medicine and the matching of appropriate treatments to each patient”, researchers have continued to exploit nonhuman animals instead of developing non-animal approaches to replace the use of nonhuman animals in the study of human respiratory diseases.

Animal researchers all over the country, including at UAB, continue to line their pockets with money purposefully diverted from human-relevant research, while their hands violently restrain, harm, and kill their nonhuman moneymakers.

These experiments help no one save the researchers themselves, and they must be stopped. 

We, as taxpayers, want better. 

Humans waiting for COPD treatments need better.

The being whose face peeks out from between the bars deserves far better.

So, on our, their, and his behalf, let’s demand it.

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