Photo: turbosquid.com
Animal testing was the norm some years ago, in all industries, including the auto one. With pressure from the public came the realization that the same results can be achieved with other means, without having to sacrifice poor animals in the process.
Someone forgot to pass the memo to researchers from the Institute of Traffic Medicine in China, though, because they recently used 15 live pigs in lieu of crash test dummies. Their goal was to determine the exact injuries a 6-year-old child strapped in his or her car seat would suffer in case of an impact at 30 mph. Their reasoning for using animals was that pigs are similar to humans in more ways than one, including their anatomy.
PETA is uttering a collective “pish-posh!” on the latter claim. For the record, the study was conducted at least a couple of years ago and submitted for publishing in November 2017. It was published in the January 2019 issue of the Journal of Crashworthiness, but word about it only spread online at the end of last month.
Considering what the poor animals went through before expiring, the public outrage is justified (and it’s not coming from PETA only). To defend themselves, researchers noted that their study hadn’t been approved by an ethics committee, but they stressed they kept with the U.S. guidelines for the use of laboratory animals.
PETA points out that, for all the alleged good intentions behind the study, the way it was conducted was cruel. Moreover, the cruelty was unnecessary. Pigs and humans may be alike in many respects, but they’re different in one that should have mattered here: they’re not made to sit in a baby car seat.
“Despite the existence of sophisticated animal-free models, experimenters continue to fasten abused, frightened animals into car seats and crash them into walls until their bodies are bloody, bruised, and mangled,” PETA says. “Pigs don’t naturally sit up in car seats. Their anatomy is also very different from that of humans, so the data obtained from these horrific animal experiments aren’t applicable to human car-crash victims.”
So much for “science.”
PETA is uttering a collective “pish-posh!” on the latter claim. For the record, the study was conducted at least a couple of years ago and submitted for publishing in November 2017. It was published in the January 2019 issue of the Journal of Crashworthiness, but word about it only spread online at the end of last month.
Considering what the poor animals went through before expiring, the public outrage is justified (and it’s not coming from PETA only). To defend themselves, researchers noted that their study hadn’t been approved by an ethics committee, but they stressed they kept with the U.S. guidelines for the use of laboratory animals.
PETA points out that, for all the alleged good intentions behind the study, the way it was conducted was cruel. Moreover, the cruelty was unnecessary. Pigs and humans may be alike in many respects, but they’re different in one that should have mattered here: they’re not made to sit in a baby car seat.
“Despite the existence of sophisticated animal-free models, experimenters continue to fasten abused, frightened animals into car seats and crash them into walls until their bodies are bloody, bruised, and mangled,” PETA says. “Pigs don’t naturally sit up in car seats. Their anatomy is also very different from that of humans, so the data obtained from these horrific animal experiments aren’t applicable to human car-crash victims.”
So much for “science.”
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