• Home Page
• Cruelty
• Animals on Farms
• Experimentation
• Wildlife
• Sport and Entertainment
• Nutrition
• Recipes
• Animal Law
• Eating Wildlife
• Meat and the Environment
• Cruelty Free Products
• Vegetarian Restaurants

• Things to do
• School activities
• About us
• Contacts us
• Membership
• Mail us
• Links
• Credits

Web

animalliberation.org.au

• About Animal Liberation
• Pigs
• Battery Hens
• Dairy
• Chickens
• Live Sheep Export
• Adelaide Free Range Egg Outlets
• Compassionate Recipes
• Companion Animals
• Product Testing on Animals
• Can greenies eat meat?
• Cattle methane
• Milking the Murray
• The real cost of chicken
• CSIRO's Cancer Diet
• Eating Water
• Eating Plants

• Greenhouse Gases
• Water Usage Quiz
• Bush Tucker
• Climate Change

• New South Wales
• Queensland
• Victoria
• Tasmania
• Animals Australia

Non-Animal Alternatives

Research without animals

When they want to study a disease process, or even normal physiology, some researchers look for an "animal model". They look for a species in which they can produce a human disease.

Animals have even been given disorders that normally only affect humans. For example, chemicals are used to produce something like anxiety, schizophrenia, or Parkinson's disease in animals. Something like depression is produced by giving animals electric shocks to the feet.

However, a disease in animals is rarely the same as in humans. This difference can produce misleading results. For example, none of the drugs that have worked in the "rat model" of stroke have been useful for treating humans.

Animals have also been used to study normal brain functions. For example, electrodes have been implanted in the brains of animals to study functions such as the processing of visual information.

Valuable research can be done without causing pain, stress and death to animals. There are research methods which are not only more humane, but also more accurate.

Non-animal research methods

Body scans

New technology allows researchers to look inside human bodies without causing any harm. These techniques include positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalo-graphy (MEG).

These methods produce a coloured picture of internal organs, such as the brain. They can show changes caused by diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or stroke. They can show the normal functioning of the brain, for example, what happens while people are solving puzzles. They can also show problems in other organs, for example tumours, and how well drugs are absorbed into these tumours.

Human tissues

Blood from volunteers, tumours, and tissues such as liver, vein, brain or intestine removed during normal operations can be used to study disease processes and the effect of drugs.

For example, human tissues can be infected with viruses such as HIV to test the effect of different drugs. Human tumours can be used to test anti-cancer drugs.

In the USA and the UK there are tissue banks where researchers can order the human tissue they need for their studies. Human placentas can be used for some studies rather than being discarded after babies are born.

Human studies

Volunteers can be used in harmless experiments such as nutrition and disease prevention programs. Volunteers can also be used instead of laboratory animals in psychological tests and learning studies.

Epidemiology is another type of human study. It examines the relationship between diseases in a population and various environmental factors, for example the relationship between the diet of different ethnic groups and their rate of cancer.

People with particular problems can be asked to contribute information to studies, for example, during their normal treatment. Valuable information can be gained by examining people after their death, for example, for the effects of Alzheimer's disease.

Micro-organisms

There are a number of useful tests that use micro-organisms, such as the Ames test for cancer-causing chemicals and the hydra test for birth defects. The Ames test uses a particular type of salmonella bacteria. It has been used for many years in laboratories around the world.

Computers

Computer databases can be used to make information more available, for example, details of in vitro tests or alternatives to animals in teaching.

Computers are also being used to predict whether new chemicals are likely to have damaging effects. The computer programme compares the molecular structure of a new chemical to the structure of known chemicals in its database. When it finds a close match, it can predict that the new chemical will similar effects to the old, matched chemical.

For a more detailed version of this document about humane research methods, including references, go to More about research without animals .

For examples of actual medical experiments without animals or animal tissues, see the web site of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research . The motto of the Trust is "Saving lives tomorrow without taking life today".

Another internet document is Research without animals