Saturday, November 17th at 2 p.m. at Place Masséna, dozens of people, all dressed in white, will silently stand with signs denouncing the cruelty and futility of animal experimentation (vivisection) during this action organized by the abolitionist collective International Campaigns with the Animal Collective of the 06°.
This action is part of the national campaign Stop Animals in Labs, which consists of peacefully protesting in large French cities where many public and private laboratories conduct experiments on animals (action already carried out in Montpellier,
Marseille, Toulouse, Lyon, Bordeaux, Dijon, Orléans, Paris, and Chartres.)
In and around Nice, animal experimentation is everywhere:
Some examples: Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology in Sophia Antipolis (animal experimentation of pain-relief substances); Valrose Institute of Biology in Nice (experiments on mice); Laboratory of Ion Channel Pathophysiology at the Faculty of Sciences of Valrose, Nice (in vivo study on mouse skeletal muscles); GALDERMA in Sophia Antipolis; BAYER CROP SCIENCE Research Center in Sophia Antipolis (specializing in pest control and plant biotechnology), VIRBAC in Carros.
France, with nearly 500 establishments and laboratories practicing vivisection, holds the grim record in Europe for animal use.
Each year, more than 2.5 million animals, with no other status than “biological material” although they are sentient and conscious beings deprived of their fundamental rights to live freely without use and exploitation by humans, are used and tormented in a thousand ways before being killed in laboratories. These are mostly rodents (mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, gerbils, …), rabbits, cats, dogs, primates, but also birds and so-called farm animals (figures constantly increasing for these two categories) as well as countless invertebrates.
Thus, in Europe, there are at least more than 12 million animals that suffer from experiments and tests as diverse as they are painful, notably for biomedical research, genetic manipulation, toxicity tests of chemical and cosmetic substances, but also for basic research and education.
Human victims
The side effects of drugs caused the death of 200,000 people in the European Union in 2010 (official figures). More and more researchers are affirming that these
research and tests on living animals can today be conducted, notably on human stem cells and thanks to a whole range of animal-free alternative methods. The results are only more reliable.
Associations of scientists—researchers and doctors—such as Antidote Europe oppose vivisection for reasons of scientific reliability.
As a reminder, like so many other drugs now withdrawn from the market, Mediator had “successfully” passed animal tests, never revealing its serious or even fatal side effects for humans.
