14 DAY TRIAL // Pamela Anderson has been challenged to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and raise awareness and money for the ALS Association in the hope of finding a cure for the disease, but unlike all other celebrities who were more than quick to douse themselves with ice water for the cause, she’s turning it down.
In a long post on her Facebook, the former “Baywatch” bombshell explains that she would have been happy to do the challenge because she’s not the one to step down from a good dare or the invitation to do something for a good cause.
If you’re feeling a “but” coming in, that’s because it is: Pamela says that she was this close to accepting the challenge but then she did some research and found out several things that bothered her with the ALS Association, i.e. the organization that receives all the donations.
Her biggest gripe is the fact that they still do most of their research and testing on animals, so, instead of donating the money or pouring ice water over herself, she’s challenging the Association to put an end to unnecessary animal cruelty.
She makes a point of arguing that the death of the animals doesn’t lead to anything positive, in the sense that the ALS is still to come up with a good human drug based on the results they got from testing on animals.
“Recent experiments funded by the ALS Association, mice had holes drilled into their skulls, were inflicted with crippling illnesses, and were forced to run on an inclined treadmill until they collapsed from exhaustion. Monkeys had chemicals injected into their brains and backs and were later killed and dissected,” she writes.
“What is the result of these experiments (other than a lot of suffering)? In the past decade, only about a dozen experimental ALS treatments have moved on to human trials after being shown to alleviate the disease in animals. All but one of these treatments failed in humans – and the one that ‘passed’ offers only marginal benefits to humans who suffer from ALS. This massive failure rate is typical for animal experiments, because even though animals feel pain and suffer like we do, their bodies often react completely differently to drugs and diseases,” Pamela continues.
She believes that more modern methods of testing, like in vitro, computer-modeling techniques and studies on human volunteers, would return better results, while also sparing the lives of so many little animals.
“Trying to cure human diseases by relying on outdated and ineffective animal experiments isn’t only cruel – it’s a grave disservice to people who desperately need cures,” she says, including a link to a website that lists organizations that never run tests on animals, and urging her fans to support those.
Her post, though undoubtedly coming from a good place, has been received with mixed reactions because it does seem like Pamela is putting the lives of those who suffer from ALS beneath those of the animals on which the Association conducts test. Of course, there are also those who command her for staying true to her beliefs, even if she does it at the expense of a good cause.