PEORIA -- Here's a commentary from Monica Ball of Peoria Area Voices for Animals. She makes an interesting point, that the Peoria Zoo, which cages animals, is a perfect site for a March of Dimes fundraiser, since that charity uses animals for experiments, aka torture. Many people believe it's no longer necessary to use animals for medical experiments, as other methods provide better results. Read it and weep:
"I find it interesting and perfectly consistent that the March of Dimes will be holding a fund raising event at the Peoria Zoo this spring. After all, what better place to raise funds for a charity that aggressively harms and kills animals than a place that cares so little for animals that they lock them up for their entire lives and deprive them of all that is natural to them just so humans can get a couple hours of amusement from looking at the captives from time to time?
There are many charities that use effective, humane, non-animal testing methods to provide relevant knowledge about preventing human birth defects. http://www.humaneseal.org/search.cfm lists many such charities.The March of Dimes, however, holds onto the antiquated notion that torturing and killing animals somehow helps humans to be healthier. They therefore continue to waste money on barbaric, useless, and misleading animal studies where they sew the eyes of newborn kittens shut and inject pregnant animals with nicotine. (We've known for decades that nicotine is harmful to developing human fetuses, and the torture of all those kittens never helped a single human baby because human vision development is different than vision development in felines.) They waste time, energy, and money pursuing drugs and therapies that work in some species but invariably fail in humans. And we'll never know how many life-saving drugs and treatments that would have worked in humans were discarded because they failed in animal tests.
More information about the March of Dimes is available at http://www.pcrm.org/resch/charities/mod/index.html. Not that anyone at the Peoria Zoo would care though. Animal exploiters and animal abusers need to stick together after all."
Monica Ball
Peoria Area Voices for Animals
www.AnimalRightsPeoria.org
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