Rabbits on Treadmills
The Experiment
Medical experts agree that moderate exercise is good for pregnant women and their babies. This conclusion is based on both physician observation and more than 20 years of clinical studies. O’Hagan of Midwestern University in Chicago, however, is using $200,000 in government funds to investigate questions long settled by clinical research. In this case, O’Hagan wants to know how exercise affects the flow of blood to the uterus of pregnant women—but she isn’t examining pregnant women. Instead, O’Hagan is impregnating 60 rabbits, implanting probes and catheters into them, and forcing them to run on a motorized treadmill. At the end of her experiment, O’Hagan kills the rabbits, cuts them open, and examines their fetuses.
Our analysis of O’Hagan’s protocol shows that her experiment is cruel to animals, wasteful of public funds, flawed in design, and irrelevant to women’s health, and it should be ended immediately.
Read on, and it will become painfully clear that O’Hagan’s experiment needs to stop. Then, please take a minute to find out what you can do to help end this cruel and wasteful experiment.
