Dear      :

I am contacting you in regard to your students' requests for alternatives to guarantee students the choice not to dissect/vivisect animals.

I believe your students' requests are reasonable in light of the fact that the majority of medical schools are replacing their animal labs with superior alternative methods of studying anatomy and behavior. Not only is animal research unreliable, detrimental to human health, and a waste of money, but also a cruel and barbaric practice that should be consigned to the trash bin of our past, along with slavery, foot binding and alchemy.

There are many reasons to oppose vivisection. For example, enormous physiological variations exist among humans and non-humans, thereby discounting any information obtained from animal research, since such "evidence" cannot be successfully extrapolated to human beings. In many cases, animal studies do not just hurt animals and waste money; they harm and kill people, too.

A General Accounting Office report, released in May 1990, found that more than half of the prescription drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 1976 and 1985 caused side effects that were serious enough to cause the drugs to be withdrawn from the market or relabeled. All of these drugs had been tested on animals.

Animal experimentation also misleads researchers in their studies. Dr. Albert Sabin, who developed the oral polio vaccine, cited in testimony at a congressional hearing this example of the dangers of animal-based research: "[p]aralytic polio could be dealt with only by preventing the irreversible destruction of the large number of motor nerve cells, and the work on prevention was delayed by an erroneous conception of the nature of the human disease based on misleading experimental models of the disease in monkeys."

Not only are sophisticated non-animal research methods more accurate, but they are less expensive, and less time-consuming than traditional animal-based research methods. Patients waiting for helpful drugs and treatments could be spared years of suffering if companies and government agencies would implement the efficient alternatives to animal studies. Fewer accidental deaths caused by drugs and treatments would occur if stubborn bureaucrats and wealthy vivisectors would use the more accurate alternatives.

Please listen to your wise students who are encouraging [name of school] to move ahead with the times. I look forward to hearing positive news from you soon that you are modernizing your policies and providing alternatives to your students or, better yet, replacing vivisection altogether with modern methods of studying behavior and anatomy.

Sincerely,

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