FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Animal Rights Protest

Animal rights group, Animal Freedom Aotearoa, is holding a protest
outside Skycity Convention centre at 12:30pm today during Allen
Goldenthal’s talk at the NZBio Conference. Allen Goldenthal is the
director of Valley Animal Research Centre (VARC), which has beagle breeding and testing facilities in Palmerston North and Napier.

Valley Animal Research is the first privately owned contract animal
testing laboratory in the southern hemisphere. Many of their contracts involve toxicity testing on beagles. Toxicity testing usually involves giving various doses of drugs to twenty to thirty dogs and carried out for 4-6 weeks to observe subacute toxicity or up to two years to determine the chronic toxicity of the drug[1].

Animal Freedom Aotearoa opposes vivisection on the grounds that
animal testing is ethically unjustifiable and scientifically
fraudulent.

Animal Freedom Aotearoa member Jasmine Gray says ?Beagle dogs are
often used in animal experiments because of their trusting and
friendly nature".

Ms Gray continues “We want to let the public know what is going on
behind closed doors and end animal experimentation in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Animals such as beagles suffer in silence while vivisectors like Allen Goldenthal talk about expanding their torturous business into markets in Asia.”

“Animal testing doesn?t just harm animals, it also harms humans
because our physiologies are innately different. It doesn’t make any scientific sense and cannot be ethically justified," says Ms Gray.

ENDS

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