| Killing millions of wild animals in
the name of “environmental protection”—now
there’s a warped idea—but that’s exactly
what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
plans to do.
It’s all part of a massive EPA program to screen
chemicals for effects on the body’s natural hormones
(known as “endocrine disruption”). The program
resulted from a 1996 law requiring the EPA to “develop
a screening program … to determine whether certain
substances may have an effect in humans that
is similar to an effect produced by a naturally occurring
estrogen, or such other endocrine effect as the [agency]
may designate.” However, once in the hands of
the EPA, this simple mandate quickly mutated into what
threatens to become one of the largest animal-testing
exercises of all time.
First, the EPA put together an advisory committee with
representatives from the environmental groups, industry,
and all other interested parties … except
the animal protection community. Then, on the advice
of its committee, the EPA expanded the scope of its
Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program to examine not
only “estrogen-like” effects, but effects
on “androgen” and “thyroid”
hormones as well. Then the EPA took it even further
by vastly expanding the program’s scope to include
toxicity testing on birds, fish, amphibians, and invertebrates—far
more testing than even the EPA says it needs to estimate
chemical effects in humans.
So now the EPA is in the process of developing 14 new
tests—most of which are animal-poisoning studies
and some of which kill more than 2,000 animals each!
The wildlife toxicity tests alone could potentially
quadruple the number of animals who are killed as a
result of this massive program.
Another consequence of the EPA’s unnecessary expansion
of its endocrine program is an unavoidable delay in
getting the program off the ground. Despite its congressional
mandate to implement the endocrine program within three
years of the passage of the 1996 law, the EPA is nowhere
close to fulfilling even its most basic mandate and
is now more than five years behind schedule.
In an attempt to spare countless animals from suffering
and death in laboratory-poisoning tests, PETA has filed
a legal petition with the EPA, calling on the agency
to limit the scope of its endocrine program to an assessment
of effects in humans, as was specified by the
1996 law. The EPA is required to provide a detailed
response to our petition, after which we will consider
what further legal action may be necessary. |
