Killing dogs over a cup of coffee
The real "life-saving" research going inside of HLS.

"Huntingdon performs live-saving research!" This is the claim and justification for animal testing so often fed to the press on the sanitized tours HLS gives to reporters and government inspectors. It is an assertion that is, without a trace of doubt, fundamentally and factually FALSE. Huntingdon is not in the business of developing life-saving medicines and therapies, but is instead a Contract Research Organization - a for profit company - that only tests what products it is contracted to.

In the 50 years HLS has been in operations, taking over 9 million lives, how many medical breakthroughs has it been responsible for? Perhaps all of us concerned about animal protection and public safety missed the news that HLS has cured cancer, AIDS, Parkinson's disease, heart disease, and Alzheimer's disease! The sad fact of the matter is vivisection labs like Huntingdon use valuable time and resources and squander it on meaningless animal research. With more and more people becoming ill with cancer, AIDS, having heart attacks, and suffering various other ailments, we need now, more than ever, sound and sane methods of scientific research, methods that cast aside the archaic, barbaric, and refuted concepts of animal-based research.

Huntingdon, in its Public Relations war for survival, consistently touts its research as finding cures for diseases, exploiting the personal tragedies of sick people, and the vulnerabilities of most people fearing such disease-induced suffering. This is a PR move no different that exploiting the horrendous tragedies of September 11th for political assaults on civil liberties, for launching wars for oil, and silencing any dissent and disagreement. It is an obnoxious and morally-corrupt spin on reality to sell bloody services to a public with that has shown dwindling support for such violence to animals.

What Huntingdon fails to include in its press releases and public statements about its research is what the bulk of its work is really for - the toxicity testing of chemicals (like floor coverings), pesticides (like Monsanto's weed-killer that poisons our food supply), pharmaceuticals (like diet-drugs), food additives (caramel food coloring is one of many), and dreaded GM foods. HLS does not brag about these tests to the public and would rather you don't know about them. They are not saving our lives, but rather, in many circumstances, taking them. HLS is putting products onto the market that cause cancer, cause high-blood pressure and heart disease, cause people adverse reactions when taking these drugs, and destroy our earth and its creatures.

For those brave enough, take a look, explore one of the products HLS was recently exposed testing: the coffee sweetener called Sucralose. Hardly a cure for cancer, and hardly worth the pain and death that was inflicted for it.

A Splenda Way to Die!

In a time when obesity has seen a dramatic increase, diabetes is plaguing more and more children, and doctors are warning people to cut down on their sugars, sugar giant Tate and Lyle, with the aid of McNeil Specialty Products (a division of Johnson and Johnson) came up with a sweetener 600 times more potent than real sugar! Now where do you think you go to test “safe” a product as “important” Sucralose (also called Splenda in the US) – Huntingdon Life Sciences, of course.

Huntingdon played a big role in the testing that took place to bring this garbage product to the market. An estimated 12,800 animals died in the process according to a published report in a recent scientific journal.

Some of the more gruesome details revealed:

• 32 beagle dogs were locked in metal cages for 52 weeks. They were given Sucralose mixed in with their normal feed, and blood and urine samples were collected. At the end of the study they were killed by means of exsanguiation - they had their throats slit open and bled to death. They were then cut open and their organs - by now drained of blood so easier to dissect - were examined to test the product's toxicity levels.
• Four beagle puppies were starved before being force-fed the super-sweet sugar powder. HLS employees then took blood samples from the jugulars of the infant dogs.
• An unspecified number of marmoset monkeys either died from the poisoning or were killed at the termination of the research at HLS.
• The report states that 12 of these monkeys, which were babies – under 10 months old – were force-fed Sucralose for seven weeks. Two of the primates died on the seventh day from brain defects, another primate was mysteriously killed after four weeks, and the remainder all were murdered at the completion of the seventh week. Some of the recorded observations from this study noted “in appetence, body weight loss, unwillingness to use hind leg, hopping, involuntary grip reflexes, salivation and subdued mood.”
• Huntingdon also used rabbits to study the effects of the product. These little animals were given 1200 times the expected daily intake and not surprisingly most died from the trauma. Many of the other rabbits suffered from convulsions, weight loss, and various intestinal disorders.
• Huntingdon also tested the product on pregnant rabbits, mice, and rats – killing both the mothers and the fetuses.

All in all, just another customer-sponsored project at HLS. All this pain and death for the sake of bringing to the market a sweetener that can make your ice-cream or jam 600 times sweeter. This sort of testing really should give you pause to think, and possibly send off a thank you note to HLS for all the important contributions they are making to the world.