COLOMBIA WILL BAN ALL COSMETIC ANIMAL TESTING BY 2024

Colombia has banned the use of animal testing for cosmetics. The new law takes effect in 2024.

The ban prohibits the use of animals for testing cosmetics products and ingredients. It applies to imported or manufactured products.

The bill was introduced to the nation’s Congress in 2018 by House Representative Juan Carlos Losada. Colombia is the first nation in South America to enact such a ban.

“This humane and historic new law will spare the suffering of countless animals in needless cosmetics tests,” Jan Creamer said in a statement. Creamer is the president of the nonprofit animal welfare organization, Animal Defenders International (ADI).

Creamer continued: “Thank you, Colombia, for leading the way in Latin America. We hope to see other nations take similar action.” 

Losada believes that Colombia’s move away from animal testing could also improve its business standing in the international market. “The main purpose of the bill is to stop animal suffering in the cosmetics industry. [But it can also] enable Colombian companies to enter the European market, a region that has for years rejected such tests,” he said.

Is Animal Testing Necessary?

Across the globe, the public perception of cosmetic animal testing is changing.

In September 2018, the California Cruelty Free Cosmetics Act (SB1249) passed in California. This made California the first state to ban the sale of most animal-tested cosmetics. The law took effect in January 2020. Similar laws took effect this year in Nevada and Illinois, too.

Conscious consumers are largely driving the wave of change. Shoppers are increasingly opting for cruelty-free products. One survey found that almost half of women support a cosmetics animal testing ban. Additionally, UK-based beauty and cosmetics company The Body Shop gathered eight million signatures for their campaign to “end animal testing in cosmetics forever.” The campaign is said to be the largest in history for the cause.

Besides concerns surrounding animal health, evidence suggests that testing products on animals is not an effective method of risk assessment. An article by Forbes pointed out that animal testing—which is also notoriously expensive—accurately predicts human reactions to cosmetics only 40 to 60 percent of the time.

Outside of the beauty industry, animal testing for disease research can also be inaccurate. The animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals noted that 90 percent of National Institutes of Health animal experiments fail. Ninety-five percent of pharmaceutical drugs test safely on animals, but then show different results in human trials.

Colombia Will Ban All Cosmetic Animal Testing by 2024

Investigation shows dogs bred for animal testing in France

12 August 2020

L214

Video Link – https://youtu.be/py1Pi48llVE

In Auvergne, a huge farm supplies between 1,000 and 2,000 Beagles each year to animal experimentation laboratories around the world.

In Gannat, there is a site inaccessible to the public, surrounded by fences, barbed wire, equipped with video surveillance and alarm systems. A high security prison? A military complex? No.

When we manage to glance through it to obtain a few images, we can see rows of dozens of small bare enclosures with access to concrete courtyards where beagles are locked up. These dogs are known for their gentle and affectionate character, but they will be sold as “laboratory equipment”.

According to official 2018 figures , in France, 2 million animals are used in laboratories. Rodents, fish, reptiles, macaques, marmosets, dogs, cats, horses undergo more or less invasive, more or less painful, more or less fatal experiments. However, there are alternatives to animal testing.

One of the measures of the referendum for animals, which L214 is carrying with many personalities and French NGOs, is the ban on animal testing when alternatives exist.

The post ‘Investigation shows dogs bred for animal testing in France’ is modified from an article published by L214 Éthique & Animaux in their original language.

https://blog.l214.com/2020/08/11/france-chiens-eleves-laboratoires-dexperimentation-animale

FRIGHTENING experiments on America’s cats include snapping their spines and injecting potato up their bums for “research”, sickening records show.

Barbaric tests on moggies as young as six months old for constipation and incontinence experiments involve the implantation of electrodes to stimulate bladders and colons, say campaigners.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12215724/experiments-americas-cats-exposed-spines-snapped-potato-injected-bums-research/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebarweb

Gut-wrenching photos and video of cats being operated on to insert devices have been provided exclusively to The Sun by the White Coat Waste Project, which obtained them through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The group was given receipts showing that thousands of dollars are being spent on lab cats supplied for the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) research.

These include a tabby called Milo; Oreo, a black and white cat; and tabbies Prince, Otis and Joey – all used for constipation research.

The FOIA info shows:

• The VA buys healthy cats and performs invasive surgeries to implant electrodes to remotely stimulate their bladders or colons, severs some of the cats’ spinal cords, and then kills and dissects them.
• It exposes bowels for electrode placement, before increasing pressure on the cats’ colon “in response to rectal stimulation”.
• Artificial poos made from bran, potato flour and saline “are used for bowel experiments”.

The Veterans Department says it has been granted approval to use felines to help Americans with debilitating illnesses.

For example bladder-based research was needed as, “more than 15 million Americans face the challenges of incontinence, frequent urination, or dysfunctional voiding”, where people struggle to pass stools.

CATS ‘BIG ENOUGH FOR DEVICES’

This is “often related to spinal cord injury, diabetes, or ageing, which are common in the veteran population,” says the VA.

It aims to find “better ways to diagnose and treat the causes of these problems” by using devices “that can monitor bladder volume and pressure under everyday conditions and in people without sensation.

“Cats control their bladders in ways similar to how people do, and are large enough for devices developed with them to be scalable for human use.”

FAKE POO USED

But, the VA has been slammed by the White Coat Waste Projects as “taxpayers are being forced to pay over $500,000-$1million (£782,000) per year for this waste and abuse.

“Using the FOIA, we have obtained never-before-seen videos, photos and other documents detailing constipation experiments in a US govt lab.

“Cats are given spinal cord injuries, implanted with experimental devices, and then fake faeces are forced into their rectums.

“At the end, the cats are killed,” the group says.

Justin Goodman, vice president of advocacy and public policy at the taxpayer watchdog group, told The Sun: “Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay millions for VA bureaucrats to buy healthy cats, cripple and mutilate them, and videotape their abuse in wasteful, bizarre and deadly constipation experiments.”

Analysis of medical records obtained via the FOIA show the experiments and procedures cause the cats “distress, seizures, bloody urine, and depression”, the group found.

It’s accused the VA of “torturing cats as young as six months old in cruel and wasteful constipation and incontinence experiments”.

Instead of using animals, the tests “could be done in human volunteers which would give results directly related to people”, WCW urged.

From initial information released so far, two of the experiments show approval to “use and kill 35 cats”, the campaigners added.

Purchase receipts provided by the VA shows its researchers “typically buy cats for these experiments in August and September each year.

“All of these tests are classified as painful experiments.”

Since January 2016, the VA’s constipation tests have cost taxpayers about $200,000 (£156,000) a year. This project is scheduled to run until December 2020.

These have been running alongside incontinence tests.

Mr Goodman said that after crucial lobbying “by our watchdog group and its over two million members, Congress has drawn a line in the sand.

“It has cut funding for the VA’s dog tests and directed it to phase-out its wasteful experiments on cats by 2025.

“But this taxpayer-funded horror show we’ve uncovered underscores that action is urgently needed right now.”

The VA says on its website that it “is committed to supporting the research that is needed to improve medical care for Veterans”.

More than half of its research is “done with human subjects, computer models, analysis of existing data, or collection of data from biological systems other than vertebrate animals”.

Of the remainder, rats and mice are mainly used, while “less than five per cent of that last one per cent depends on living vertebrate animals involving dogs, cats, or nonhuman primates”.

Its animal testing is approved before going ahead, with “feedback provided by at least one boarded laboratory animal veterinarian” and it undergoes further reviewing.

The VA says that “cats are the smallest known species in which the control of bowel storage and emptying are managed as in humans.

“Research is to learn more about the neurophysiology mechanisms involved, so that better therapeutic approaches can be developed.”

Felines are also used for research on sleep, to help people suffering from sleep apnoea.

Talking of back passages – here above is a prime one.

Regards Mark

 

 

The Cruelty and Waste of Animal Experimentation

The Issue

The word “vivisection,” or animal experimentation, does not begin to describe how hundreds of millions of animals are used in science every year, let alone capture the physical pain, deprivation and emotional distress experienced by animals who are cut up, poisoned, burned, irradiated, gassed, shocked, dismembered or genetically designed to suffer. Nor does it reflect the tragedy of each individual life—however short and brutal—caged in an artificial environment which deprives them of experiencing life as nature intended.

Millions of animals—primates, dogs and cats, rats and mice, rabbits, pigs, horses, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and yes, guinea pigs—are sacrificed as a result of animal experimentation. They are used in basic and applied research, for the safety testing of products, to be bred or harvested from the wild to be killed and cut up for dissection, and as living factories of byproducts to be used as ingredients in drugs or laboratory experiments.

NAVS opposes the use of animals in scientific research and product testing for both ethical and scientific reasons. Animal experimentation is cruel. It is an outdated and inadequate methodology that can produce invalid, often misleading results. It wastes money and resources and sidetracks meaningful scientific progress.

Background

The practice of animal experimentation has been debated for centuries—seemingly pitting the pursuit of knowledge and human health against compassion for animals. Society has allowed animal experimentation because people have been convinced that it was a “necessary evil,” and that it was the only way to find cures for human diseases and to make drugs, cosmetics and other products safe. Secrecy and security have ensured that people are unaware of what happens behind the laboratory doors or wrongly trust that the laws intended to prohibit cruelty to animals include protection for animals used in research.

Defenders of animal experimentation argue that nonhuman animals are enough like humans to make them scientifically adequate models of human diseases or to test treatments or the safety of products.  They also contend that other species are different enough from people to make it ethically acceptable to use them in experiments.

NAVS argues that it is the way that humans and nonhuman animals are similar that provides the basis for the ethical objection to animal experimentation. Perhaps the English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, said it best when he asked, “The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk?  But can they suffer?”

There is little doubt that some breakthroughs in the past were made as a result of animal experimentation; but the questions being asked of science today are more complex and society has grown in its respect and appreciation for other sentient creatures, due in large part to studies of their behaviour and intelligence. Sophisticated technologies available today and under development promise new and better avenues for investigation. Many of these approaches offer human relevance and insight in ways that animal models have not, and cannot, provide.

How NAVS Helps

If people could witness what is done to animals in the name of science, they would share our outrage and impatience with the all too slow rate of progress in ending these practices. Since 1929, NAVS’ response to the cruel, archaic, wasteful and unnecessary practice of animal experimentation is to work towards the advancement of science without harming animals. We look to science to inspire, to inform, to heal and to help solve the world’s problems. Science is about discovery and exploration. Science replaces ignorance and superstition with knowledge. But scientific investigation that exploits innocent animals as objects to use and abuse, causing unspeakable suffering and death, is not progress. We know that every animal is amazing in their own way—intelligent, social, complex—designed by evolution to be the best at what they do and deserving to be treated with respect. Investing in more humane methods of scientific inquiry will lead to better science.

NAVS is a respected leader of advocates for animals and better, more humane science. We are dedicated to ending harmful, flawed and costly animal experiments through the advancement of smarter, human-relevant research and the promotion of animal-friendly changes to laws and policies:

• We work with respected scientists to advance modern, human-relevant scientific methods that replace the use of animals through our support of the International Foundation for Ethical Research (IFER) and other promising collaborations with the scientific community.
• NAVS’ Advocacy Center empowers supporters to take action that promotes greater protection for animals through the legal/legislative and policy-making processes.
• We provide innovative teaching tools and resources that replace animal dissection while enhancing education in the life sciences. NAVS also provides incentives to encourage young scientists to pursue careers that advance science without harming animals.
• NAVS’ Sanctuary Fund provides emergency financial assistance to support animals retired from laboratories and those threatened by natural and man-made disasters.

 

Text reproduced from the NAVS website.

https://www.navs.org/the-issues/the-cruelty-and-waste-of-vivisection/#.XxWzK3uSnIW

 

 

More WAV reading:

https://worldanimalsvoice.com/2020/07/19/uk-mauritius-paradise-lost-35-years-on-for-us-and-mauritius-still-supplies-primates-to-the-uk-for-research/