Alix Fano

About the author: Alix Fano is director of the Campaign for Responsible Transplantation and the author of Lethal Laws: Animal Testing, Human Health and Environmental Policy.

While mice are regularly used in chemical testing, their physiology —which is very different from humans—makes them inadequate and unreliable subjects. For that reason, results from chemical tests on mice can be misleading. Furthermore, the experiments are extremely painful for the animals and are undermined by the use of improper test methods. For example, the chemical doses fed to mice are higher than any dose a human would likely be exposed to. Moreover, testing conditions are stressful, which tends to skew the results because stressed animals react differently to substances than do relaxed animals. The fact that pollution and unsafe chemicals still exist in the...