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World Wildlife Fund » Grade: F
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been actively pressuring
government agencies in the United States, Europe, and Canada
to greatly increase the amount of testing that they require
for new and existing chemicals and pesticides. The result
of the WWF’s lobbying has been the establishment of
what threaten to be the largest animal-testing programs of
all time.
The WWF was the driving force in pressuring the U.S. Congress
to legislate the screening of chemicals for “endocrine
(hormone) disrupting” effects and has subsequently been
heavily involved in establishing the framework for the Environmental
Protection Agency’s (EPA) massive chemical-testing program
now under development. As its Web site points out: “WWF
invested substantial resources in the EPA’s Endocrine
Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory Committee,”
which “agreed upon a set of tests to form the foundation
for the screening and testing program.” What the WWF
neglects to mention, however, is that 10 of the 15 recommended
screens and tests are animal-poisoning studies, some of which
kill hundreds or thousands of animals at a time. According
to scientific estimates, the WWF-backed endocrine testing
program will kill up to 1.2 million animals for every 1,000
chemicals tested, and with the EPA currently proposing to
retest many tens of thousands of chemicals under this program,
the toll in animal suffering and death could be staggering.
The WWF is also pressuring government agencies in Europe to
embark on a similar animal-testing program.
Unfortunately, the “endocrine disruptor” issue
is not an isolated example. The WWF has been a major force
in pressuring the European Union to amend its Chemicals Policy
to require companies to test and retest as many as 30,000
new and existing chemicals. The British Institute for Environmental
Health has estimated that this process could kill upwards
of 45 million animals if the standard battery of animal-poisoning
tests is used. The WWF’s U.S. and Canadian offices are
also calling for more testing of pesticides, despite the fact
that more than 9,000 animals are already killed for every
pesticide on the market. In particular, the WWF has called
for certain pesticides to be tested for “developmental
neurotoxicity” (DNT) using a test that kills upwards
of 1,300 animals each time it is conducted. This test has
been heavily criticized by scientists, including the EPA’s
own Scientific Advisory Panel, which concluded that “the
exposure of rat fetus/pups was not shown to be equivalent
to human fetus/infant during equivalent stages of brain development”
and that “the current form of the DNT guideline is not
a sensitive indicator of toxicity to the offspring.”
In other words, the WWF is calling for thousands of animals
to be killed in a test that scientists admit is not relevant
to humans!
In its defense, the WWF says that “in the absence of
effective, validated alternatives, WWF believes that limited
animal testing is needed for the long-term protection of wildlife
and people throughout the world.” However, there is
nothing “limited” about the massive amount of
animal testing that the WWF is endorsing. Dr. Joshua Lederberg,
Nobel laureate in medicine, pointed out in 1981: “It
is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to
go through chemicals in the blind way we have at the present
time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to
human health.” Now more than 20 years later, millions
of animals are still dying in agonizing chemical toxicity
tests, and we are no closer to getting dangerous chemicals
out of the environment. In fact, despite killing hundreds
of thousands of animals in painful chemical toxicity tests,
the EPA has not banned a single toxic industrial chemical
in more than a decade!
For more information about PETA's dealings with the WWF on
animal testing and other issues, visit WickedWildlifeFund.com.
Meanwhile, in a positive development, the WWF has agreed to
meet with PETA and consider our proposal to drop animal tests
from the EPA’s endocrine program and replace them with
high-tech, non-animal methods. The WWF has also expressed
support for PETA’s call to dramatically downsize the
EPA’s current plan to screen as many as 87,000 chemicals—which
would spell suffering and death for tens of millions of animals.
The WWF has told us that it would support reducing the number
of chemicals tested under the EDSP to “about one thousand.”
That’s a good start.
What You Can Do
Please write polite letters urging the WWF to go all the way and turn its back on crude and cruel animal tests once and for all. Click here for points that you can include in your letter. Read what Sir Paul McCartney had to say on October 10, 2002, and March 24, 2003. Send your letters to:
Carter S. Roberts, President and CEO
WWF-US
1250 24th St. N.W.
Washington, DC 20037
Fax: 202-778-9637
Email: Patricia.Gvozdich@wwfus.org
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