Environmental Organizations

A clean, safe, and healthy environment is important to everyone, and we all want to see it protected. With this goal, people donate millions of dollars each year to organizations that say they are working to protect the environment and wildlife. Many people are shocked, however, to learn that some "environmental" and "wildlife protection" groups use the donations that they receive to support activities that are extremely harmful to animals and accomplish little or nothing to protect the environment.

For example, pressure from prominent environmental groups has led to the creation of what threaten to become the largest animal-testing programs of all time:

U.S. and international programs to retest potentially tens of thousands of chemicals for so-called "endocrine-disrupting" effects on the hormone system
A massive European program to gather toxicity information on 30,000 common chemicals
U.S.and international programs to gather toxicity information on nearly 3,000 "high production volume" or "HPV" chemicals

Yet despite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of animals in crude and cruel government-mandated toxicity tests, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not banned a single toxic industrial chemical in more than a decade. Chemicals such as benzene and trichloroethylene are instead tested and retested ad nauseum--the bureaucratic alternative to taking action on chemicals already known to be dangerous by reducing emissions and preventing human and environmental exposure.

The chemical and pesticide industries go along with these endless animal tests as they serve to delay regulation, and the test results are always subject to interpretation and challenge in the courts. If chemicals--such as atrazine or phthalates--are shown to cause cancer or other harmful effects in animal studies, industry representatives claim that the results aren't applicable to humans and successfully challenge any attempt to regulate them. At the same time, company officials won't hesitate to point to animal-test results suggesting that their products are not harmful.

Government agencies' addiction to animal testing is often so strong that even when evidence from human population studies implicates a chemical, the results are ignored for the sake of conducting more and more animal studies. For years, population studies have shown that arsenic in drinking water causes cancer in humans. Yet the EPA dragged its institutional feet for more than 20 years while thousands of animals were killed in tests that attempted to reproduce the effects already seen in humans.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Wasted Money, Wasted Lives

High Production Volume (HPV) Chemical-Testing Program

The Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP)

EPA Pesticide Program

Developmental Neurotoxicity (DNT) Testing

Environmen -talists Get an "F" in Compassion
PETA's report card on "environmental" and "conservation" groups flunks those who support animal abuse.

World Wildlife Fund and Animal Testing
WWF's pressure on agencies to increase testing for dangerous chemicals could mean the largest animal-testing programs of all time.

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