So lately I’ve been reading up on ICCVAM — the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods. It started with my finding an editorial on the Doris Day Animal League website — there’s a section where Members of Congress, public policy experts, and federal regulators express their thoughts on current animal welfare issues. One of the contributors, Representative Ken Calvert (Republican), writes about how he introduced the ICCVAM Authorization Act of 2000. This legislation was aimed at making ICCVAM create guidelines that promote alternative-to-animal-testing-methods, and required the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and other federal agencies to comply with the guidelines (ICCVAM was created in 1993 — it unites representatives from 17 federal agencies and programs for the coordination of the development and review of alternative-to-animal-testing-methods. It was hoped that when it was created it would ensure that the lives of millions of test animals were not “taken needlessly.”) (Though, disturbingly, Colgate-Palmolive, Gillette, and Procter and Gamble, which are huge animal-testing-offenders, supported the bill as well — although it saves animal lives, it also saves chemical and pharmaceutical companies millions of dollars by eliminating some tests that involved animals and were very expensive. I guess that’s a win-win situation.)

I was very excited by this, and I was so pleased Representative Ken Calvert was doing this sort of thing, until I remembered that most anti-animal-testing organizations hate ICCVAM. Apparently it’s been totally taken over by animal-testing-offenders like Colgate-Palmolive, Gillette, and Procter and Gamble, and has managed to approve only one alternative testing method in the whole ten years of its existence. Can you imagine? Think of the huge amount of taxpayers’ money spent just to fund one totally ineffective organization that has only managed to do one thing in 10 years. This is especially disturbing since ICCVAM’s (competent) European counterpart has managed to approve 20 alternative-test-methods, so Europe is far ahead of us in terms of saving lives of laboratory animals. Even the U.S. National Academy of Sciences — a fairly conservative organization — has called for ICCVAM to approve the use of more alternative methods. Some people even argue that ICCVAM is jeopardizing peoples’ health, since non-animal -testing-methods have been demonstrated to be more accurate, more sensitive, and more protective than using rats (I think this boils down to people aren’t rats — you can do better tests if you use synthetic human flesh instead of live animal flesh).

If you’d like to send a letter to your congressperson or senator about how ineffective you think ICCVAM has been, or see a really unpleasant video about the horrors of animal testing (hosted by James Cromwell! I’m so pleased he’s against animal testing — I love him as Jack Bauer’s evil father on 24) please click here.

Categories : against animal testing, cruelty free