Vivisection is surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The word is, more broadly, used as a pejorative catch-all term for experimentation on live animals by organizations opposed to animal experimentation, but the term is rarely used by practicing scientists. Human vivisection, such as live organ harvesting, has been perpetrated as a form of torture.
In the animal rights movement, cruelty-free is a label for products or activities that do not harm or kill animals anywhere in the world. Products tested on animals or made from animals are not considered cruelty-free, since these tests are often painful and cause the suffering and death of millions of animals every year.
Frances Power Cobbe was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, religious thinker, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading women's suffrage campaigner. She founded a number of animal advocacy groups, including the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in 1875 and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898, and was a member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.
Shamrock Farm was the United Kingdom's only non-human primate importation and quarantine centre, located in Small Dole, near Henfield in West Sussex. The centre, owned by Bausch and Lomb and run by Charles River Laboratories, Inc. for Shamrock (GB) Ltd, provided animals to various laboratories and universities for use in animal testing. It was Europe's largest supplier of primates to laboratories, and held up to 350 monkeys at a time.
Muriel Dowding, Baroness Dowding was an English humanitarian and animal rights activist known for championing anti-vivisection, vegetarianism and the improvement of animal welfare. Like her second husband Lord Dowding, 1st Baron Dowding she was a vegetarian, an anti-vivisectionist, spiritualist and theosophist. She coined the term cruelty-free and was a pioneer of the cruelty-free movement.
Walter Robert Hadwen was an English general practitioner, pharmaceutical chemist and writer. He was president of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) and an anti-vaccination campaigner, known for his denial of the germ theory of disease.
Cambridge University primate experiments came to public attention in 2002 after the publication that year of material from a ten-month undercover investigation in 1998 by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV). The experiments were being conducted on marmosets, and included the removal of parts of their brains intended to simulate the symptoms of stroke or Parkinson's disease. Some of the research was theoretical, aimed at advancing knowledge of the brain, while some of it was applied.
Stephen William Buchanan Coleridge was an English author, barrister, opponent of vivisection, and co-founder of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Gillian Rose Langley is a British scientist and writer who specialises in alternatives to animal testing and animal rights. She was, from 1981 until 2009, the science director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, a medical research charity developing non-animal research techniques. She was an anti-vivisection member of the British government's Animal Procedures Committee for eight years, and has worked as a consultant on non-animal techniques for the European Commission, and for animal protection organizations in Europe and the United States. Between 2010 and 2016 she was a consultant for Humane Society International.
The National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) is an international non-profit animal protection group, based in London, working to end animal testing, and focused on the replacement of animals in research with advanced, scientific techniques. Since 2006, the NAVS has operated its international campaigns under the working name Animal Defenders International (ADI), and the two groups now work together under the ADI name.
Nafovanny in Vietnam is the largest captive-breeding primate facility in the world. It supplies crab-eating Macaques to animal testing laboratories.
Cosmetic testing on animals is a type of animal testing used to test the safety and hypoallergenic properties of cosmetic products for use by humans.
The American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS) is a Jenkintown, Pennsylvania-based animal protectionism organization created with the goal of eliminating a number of different procedures done by medical and cosmetic groups in relation to animal cruelty in the United States. It seeks to help the betterment of animal life and human-animal interaction through legislation reform. It was the first anti-vivisection organization founded in the United States.
Harlan Sprague Dawley Inc. was a supplier of animals and other services to laboratories for the purpose of animal testing. It provided pre-clinical research tools and services for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agrochemicals, industrial chemical, and food industries.
The Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society (ADAVS), also known as the Animal Defence Society was an animal welfare organisation, co-founded in England, in 1906, by Lizzy Lind af Hageby, and Nina Douglas-Hamilton, Duchess of Hamilton. The objective of the Society was a "Consistent Opposition to all forms of Cruelty to Animals and Abolition of Vivisection". The Society was known for its support of humane slaughter.
Beauty Without Cruelty (BWC) was founded as an educational charitable trust in England in 1959 by Muriel, the Lady Dowding (1908–1993), past president of the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) and wife of Lord Dowding (1882–1970), the former commander-in-chief of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. It investigated and exposed the brutality inflicted on animals in the fur and cosmetic trade and led the way in the commercial production of synthetic alternatives to fur and cosmetics, without the use of animal ingredients and not tested on animals, pioneering the cruelty-free movement. The initial fundamental purpose of the charitable trust was to demonstrate that alternatives to cruelly derived clothing and cosmetics were easily obtainable and, if they did not exist, to get them on the market. BWC spread the concept that one could easily look beautiful, without inflicting cruelty and death upon any creature.
Rise for Animals is a national, registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit animal rights organization which aims to end nonhuman animal experimentation. It has been described as "one of the oldest and wealthiest anti-vivisection organizations in the United States".
The Anti-Vivisection Coalition (AVC) is a United Kingdom-based pressure group which campaigns against animal testing. The AVC are described as 'main driver' of the Stop Vivisection Initiative, a petition launched in November 2012 which attracted more than a million signatures. The Stop Vivisection Initiative called upon the European Union to ban animal testing. If the signatures are verified, "the initiative will be granted hearings at the European Commission and the European Parliament".
The European Coalition to End Animal Experiments (ECEAE) is a European umbrella organisation based in Cologne, Germany. It is actively operating in favour of animal rights and in particularly, an abolishment of testing on animals. The ECEAE was created in 1990 as an umbrella association for national organisations working for the abolition of all animal experiments. The original aim was to reach a ban on the testing of cosmetics on animals. Later, other campaign objectives were added, including banning experiments on non-human primates, in the field of regulatory animal testing and animal tests for botulinum toxin, better known as botox.
Animal welfare and rights in Switzerland is about the treatment of and laws concerning non-human animals in Switzerland. Switzerland has high levels of animal welfare protection by international standards.
