March of Dimes’ WalkAmerica is scheduled to take place here in Asheville on April 28. When people give to the March of Dimes (MOD), they expect their money will help babies. Instead, MOD has funded dozens of experiments using primates, cats, dogs, rabbits, sheep and other animals.
MOD experimenters have immobilized monkeys in restraints for days at a time, given ferrets and other animals severe brain damage, and wasted millions of dollars addicting pregnant rats and infant opossums to nicotine, cocaine and alcohol—even though it has long been known that these substances can harm a developing baby.
The March of Dimes has taken in close to $1 billion at WalkAmerica events since they began in 1970, yet according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rates for many birth defects have gone up.
Birth defects are prevented and babies are saved when research dollars go to effective and relevant research, which comes from studying human problems in human babies—not from sewing kittens’ eyes shut or addicting rats to cocaine. Animal experiments hurt humans as well as animals. Through the years, animal tests have often led scientists in the wrong direction, thereby delaying medical progress and prolonging human suffering.
Many charities, including Easter Seals, Birth Defect Research for Children, Child Health Foundation and the Heimlich Foundation, put all their funds into programs that directly benefit families affected by birth defects and never waste a penny on cruel animal experiments. Forward-thinking health charities fund humane, modern and effective nonanimal research—such as human-cell and tissue cultures, complex computer-modeling and scanning techniques, and human-epidemiological studies—as well as administering care to people who are already sick. Get your guide to cruelty-free giving at www.marchofcrimes.com.
— Kayla Rae Worden
Weaverville
If hooking a car battery up to a Puggle will keep my wife from dying of cancer in 30 years, all I have to say is that red is positive and black is negative.