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Animal rights charity PETA is urging Chinese authorities to stop what it describes as ‘barbaric’ crash tests using live pigs.
The charity has revealed that a number of the animals have been forced into unnatural positions, strapped into car seats, and crashed into walls ‘until their bodies are bloody, bruised, and mangled’. If they do not die from the experiment, they are then killed and dissected.
These kinds of tests have not been carried out in the States since 1993, after an 18-month-long PETA campaign.
‘Pulverized’
Campaigners have branded the experiments, which were carried out at China’s Research Institute for Traffic Medicine, ‘cruel, archaic, and unjustifiable’.
“Pigs don’t naturally sit up in car seats. (Notice how their front legs had to be tied and held up for this test). Their anatomy is also very different from that of humans, so the data obtained from these horrific animal experiments aren’t applicable to human car-crash victims,” according to PETA’s Zachary Toliver.
“Non-animal research methods using state-of-the-art manikins or human cadavers are readily available and already in use by major automakers around the world.”
PETA has written China’s Research Institute for Traffic Medicine and Daping Hospital, urging it to stop the experiments.