What is Vivisection?

Vivisection is the practice of animal experimentation. This can include administering drugs, infecting with diseases, poisoning for toxicity testing, brain damaging, maiming, blinding, and other painful and invasive procedures. It can include protocols that cause severe suffering, such as long-term social isolation, full-body restraint, electric shocks, withholding of food and water, or repeatedly breeding and separating infants from mothers. Essentially, it is using animals in ways that cause distress, and/or death in attempts to test the safety of drugs and biological products or of finding treatments, prevention or cures for human diseases. However, results derived from the animal model are not valid or relevant for humans. Tens of millions (some estimate in excess of 25 million) of animals in the U.S. suffer, die or are killed each year in laboratories for biomedical experimentation, product and cosmetic testing, and for “science” “education.”

Although vivisection literally means ‘to cut up alive’, the term has come to include all experiments involving animals, and not just those involving dissection. Call it what you will, animal experiments are always cruel, causing psychological and/or physical suffering to all of its victims.



Vivisection cannot be justified neither ethically nor scientifically. Those who practice vivisection – and accuse their opponents of being “sentimental” toward animals – tout the self-serving presumption that the question ultimately boils down to “animals’ lives instead of yours”. By contrast, antivivisectionists consider the vivisectors’ stock question “Would you prefer to save a mouse or a child?” to be meaningless. Instead, they ask: “Why not strive to save both? Why be forced to choose between two evils?”

To fight for kinder laws and better cages is almost as cruel as the animal’s suffering because these ideals still keep them in cages.

Obviously, if humans were to be subjected to vivisection, the amount of pain they would feel would certainly not depend on their communication skills nor on their ability to solve differential equations – suffering is the same for geniuses and dunces. Likewise, non-human animals suffer in the same ways and to the same degree as humans. Those who provoke the suffering are criminals – whether their justification is that they are helping humanity or helping their own careers. Especially with so many non-animal alternatives available RIGHT NOW!

Imagine spending your entire life as a hospital patient or prisoner, and this will only begin to approximate the life of an animal in a laboratory. Animals in labs live stressful, unnatural lives of daily confinement and deprivation. They spend their lives in barren cages, unable to exert their will, make choices or express their natural behaviors and needs. Most never experience fresh air or sunshine, only bars and concrete. The only changes in their lives come from invasive experiments, which range from uncomfortable to agonizing, can go on for decades. And they are helpless to defend themselves.

Millions of taxpayer dollars, wasted for pointless animal experiments




What You Can Do

-Organize a protest at a school or university….we can help!

-Serious animal rights groups protest important issues with strong actions and sustained campaigns. For information about how you can become involved in your area contact


– Become vegan. If people stop using and eating animal, others stop killing animals for profit. Period.
Get your free vegan starter kit (click on learn more)

-Buy only cruelty-free cosmetics and household products. Many are found in dollar stores!

-Be aware of non-animal alternatives because most researchers will lie saying there aren’t any for what they do.


5 comments on “Vivisection

  1. What really irates me is the NIH knows the truth. EVERYTHING in this country is politically (greedy) motivated. They know animal models cause human death,, but they don’t care about the animals nor the humans. They have bean counters who estimate the lose of profit due to death,, and profit seems to out weigh remorse. People need to start saying NO to anything medical that experiments on animals. I know AstraZeneca is a large one. Tell your doctor NO, or fire his ass. He works for you much to his belief

  2. Pingback: 30 Reasons Why Animal Testing Doesn’t Work « Animals In Print


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