Téléthon 2020: Demand an End to Cruel Dog Experiments
Servane Barbot has been living with muscular dystrophy (MD) for almost 25 years . In a video for PETA France, she publicly denounces the cruelty and ineffectiveness of using dogs in MD experiments seeking a cure for myopathy, which causes muscle weakness – and she calls on French charity AFM-Téléthon to fund only non-animal research.
In the video, Servane explains why she opposes the animal experiments funded by AFM-Téléthon’s annual December fundraising drive:
It was 15 years ago that my family and friends told me that scientific research was making great strides and that it would soon be possible for disabled people like me suffering from muscle disease to benefit from new treatments.
Today, there is still no treatment.
Why?
All these years, laboratories have only been experimenting on animals to try to cure human pathologies. But the fact is that no species can be a biological model for another species, and the results observed in one species are not applicable to another. . . .
Those who experiment on animals often use emotional arguments to claim that their archaic methods are the only way to help cure diseases, but this isn’t true.
Today, there are better methods that have led to the development of
more promising therapies to help people with paralytic muscle disease.For example, groundbreaking scientists are using cells from patients with muscular dystrophy to develop specific treatments for this disease, or they are developing methods to grow healthy human muscle cells that could be transplanted into sick patients. There are researchers who are working on these effective methods that are consistent with the human model, and who today are obtaining promising results.
While animal testing wastes time and resources and offers little hope of a cure to Servane and others with MD, animals continue to suffer and die needlessly. Footage given to PETA France by the group Animal Testing reveals that dogs struggled to walk, swallow, and even breathe in painful experiments funded by AFM-Téléthon and conducted out of public view at France’s Alfort National Veterinary School. Most of the dogs used in these tests never reach adulthood. Some are completely crippled before they even reach the age of 6 months, and half endure an agonising death before they’re 10 months old.
There are better ways to help patients with muscle diseases. Please join Servane and tens of thousands of others in urging AFM-Téléthon to stop funding these cruel experiments on dogs and to support only modern, non-animal studies.
