Meet the Animals
The Lives of AnimalsLike humans, animals have priorities, needs, preferences, emotions, and thoughts that make each one an individual. Maternal love, friendly bantering, sexual desire, and jealously are not just material for TV sitcoms–these kinds of feelings and interactions go on every day in the lives of animals, whether it's in a tropical forest or a snow-covered tundra.
For example, baboons form tight bonds with their families, groom each other, rest together, compete for mates, and enjoy a life of freedom in the African mountains and savannas that have been their home for eons. They walk 4 to 10 miles a day in their natural home to forage for food for themselves and their young, whom they tenderly nurture. They are very protective of their babies–one news report described a family of baboons that threw rocks and sticks at cars on a freeway where one of their babies lay dead in the road.
One Mother's Story
Meet Baboon #6521. We'll call her "Lisa" here. She was taken from her mother long ago, and instead of ambling for miles though grassland, she's been locked in a small, barren metal cage, alone, half a world away from her native African home.
Experimenters at Columbia University in New York have cut Lisa open in four separate surgeries. She's been impregnated twice, and both times, her babies were infused with test chemicals, cut from her stomach, and killed. When our undercover investigator found her, she was scheduled to go under the scalpel a fifth time.
If she had rocks and sticks like her free-living relatives, no doubt Lisa would throw them at the men and women in white lab coats who keep cutting her open, killing her babies, and locking her inside the metal box that has been her "home" for years.
Silent Victims
Lisa is just one example of the millions of animals who are so far removed from their natural homes, from families and friends, and from all that is natural to them. She is one face on the millions of hearts that have been broken from years of needles, scalpels, toxins, pain, solitude, and the overwhelming hopelessness of waking up day after day, year after year, in a metal box.
Rabbits, rats, cats, ducks, dogs, frogs, and primates are just a few of the kinds of animals used to test everything from mercury to hair spray. Instead of building homes for their families–whether by burrowing complex tunnel systems in the ground or lining a carefully crafted nest with their soft down–these animals are strapped down, tied up, and locked in, while experimenters break their hearts and often their bones. Instead of singing, running, courting, flying, and playing, these complex animals are reduced to mutilated beings filled with despair and terror.
Time for Change
If you've ever seen a dog bark with joy at the sight of his or her companion or a mother duck cautiously leading her ducklings to water, you've seen a small glimpse of animals' feelings, which we are only beginning to understand. If you want to help those who are pumped full of toxins, implanted with electrodes, cut open, and kept hopelessly alone, please join us. It would mean the world to mothers like Lisa.
