World Wildlife Fund promotes vivisection and other animal abuse
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been actively pressuring government agencies in
the United States, Canada, and Europe to greatly increase the amount of testing that
they require for new and existing pesticides and other chemicals. The result of the
WWF's lobbying has been the establishment of what threatens to be the largest animal-testing
programs of all time.
The WWF was the driving force in pressuring the US Congress to legislate the screening
of chemicals for "endocrine (hormone) disrupting" effects and has subsequently been
heavily involved in establishing the framework for the Environmental Protection Agency's
(EPA) massive chemical-testing program now under development. As its Web site points
out: "WWF invested substantial resources in the EPA's Endocrine Disruptor Screening
and Testing Advisory Committee," which "agreed upon a set of tests to form the foundation
for the screening and testing program." What the WWF neglects to mention, however,
is that 10 of the 15 recommended screens and tests are animal-poisoning studies,
some of which kill hundreds or thousands of animals at a time. According to scientific
estimates, the WWF-backed endocrine testing program will kill up to 1.2 million animals
for every 1,000 chemicals tested, and with environmental organisations pressing for
tens of thousands of chemicals to be retested under this program, the toll in animal
suffering and death will be staggering. The WWF is also pressuring government agencies
in Europe to embark on a similar animal-testing program.
In addition to lobbying for more chemical testing, the WWF has teamed up with Procter
& Gamble, S.C. Johnson, and other chemical companies to create an institute to pursue
"basic research" on endocrine disruptors. On top of this, the WWF is now pushing
the US Congress to pass a bill that would pour additional millions in public funds
into endocrine research, much of which would likely be used to fund experiments on
animals.
Unfortunately, the "endocrine disruptor" issue is not an isolated example. The WWF
has been a major force in pressuring the European Union to amend its Chemicals Policy
to require companies to test and retest as many as 30,000 new and existing chemicals.
The British Institute for Environmental Health estimates that this process will kill
upwards of 45 million animals if the standard battery of animal-poisoning tests is
used. The WWF's US and Canadian offices are also calling for more testing of pesticides,
despite the fact that more than 9,000 animals are already killed for each pesticide
product on the market. The organisation has called for certain pesticides to be tested
for "developmental neurotoxicity" (DNT) using a test that kills upwards of 1,300
animals each time it is conducted. This test has been heavily criticised by scientists,
including the EPA's own Scientific Advisory Panel, which concluded that "the exposure
of rat foetus/pups was not shown to be equivalent to human foetus/infant during equivalent
stages of brain development" and that "the current form of the DNT guideline is not
a sensitive indicator of toxicity to the offspring." In other words, WWF is calling
for thousands of animals to be killed in a test that scientists admit is not relevant
to humans!
In its defence, the WWF says that "in the absence of effective, validated alternatives,
WWF believes that limited animal testing is needed for the long-term protection of
wildlife and people throughout the world." However, there is nothing "limited" about
the massive amount of animal testing that the WWF is endorsing. Dr. Joshua Lederberg,
Nobel Laureate in Medicine, pointed out in 1981: "It is simply not possible with
all the animals in the world to go through chemicals in the blind way we have at
the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health."
Now more than 20 years later, millions of animals are still dying in agonizing chemical
toxicity tests, and we are no closer to getting dangerous chemicals out of the environment.
In fact, despite killing hundreds of thousands of animals in painful chemical toxicity
tests, the EPA has not banned a single toxic industrial chemical in more than a decade!
The WWF endorses the killing of wild animals, too. For information on this, and who
you can complain to, please visit:
www.wickedwildlifefund.com
See also: The Enemy Within
