This is part of the campaign to Close Down Wickham Laboratories
In a small, small town, in a secluded corner of the world, is a dirty grey building and in the dirty grey building live thousands of animals. Waiting. Waiting to be hurt and abused at the hands of the workers who come in 9-5 and conduct horrific, sometimes illegal tests on the animals.
In 1984 a small group of volunteers entered a small huddle of buildings in a sleepy Hampshire town. Inside the facility they found beagle puppies undergoing experimentation. Wickham Laboratories has long been the centre of scandal and of outrage. The campaigners who exposed the suffering of the beagles were there to find something else. It was their aim to expose the links between the stolen pet trade, and vivisection.
As if they had not caused enough of an uproar through their implications in the ex-pet trade, David Walker, director of Wickham Laboratories, proceeded to publicly call on the RSPCA to hand over their stray dogs to animal testing laboratories.
William Cartmell, the owner of Wickham is a practicing vet. You may think this would suggest he has concerns for animal welfare. This could not be further from the truth. As well as running a veterinary practice from the same site as the laboratory, Cartmell also operates a boarding kennels, once again on the same site as the lab. In the past it has been reported that pets not picked up on time were used in experiments.
In 1991 Wickham were exposed again. This time, an ex-police officer got a job working inside the laboratory undercover. He showed evidence of the suffering of over 70,000 animals every year inside Wickham (the most recent reports, however, suggest that there are now 80,000 animals a year perising inside those gates). The footage that he recovered documented row upon row of rabbits, lined up in stocks undergoing the notorious draize eye test, which involved dripping noxious substances into the rabbits eyes. The reason that rabbits are used in this test is that they do not naturally produce tears. This means that they are unable to wash the substance out of their eyes.
It comes as no surprise that Wickham have always been very secretive about the types of experiments that they carry out, and refuse to reveal what they are testing. Their website simple states that they specialise in Microbiology, Analytical Chemistry, Toxicology, Biocompatibility, and Virology. This may all sound very impressive but we have discovered that they last three on the list have been used to produce a fungicide for DuPont. This fungicide is not in fact for the benefit of human health but for the benefit of another animal abusing industry... the game shooting industry. Captive game-birds are given this fungicide to ensure that they have no contact with any natural entities, before they are released into the wild and shot down. Analytical Chemistry is used by Wickham to test the nutritional qualities of factory farmed meat.
Wickham Laboratories have a history of secrets and lies, even lying to a website designer, saying they were not a vivesection laboratory, in the hope he would design them their website. Why would they do such a thing? Because they knew that he, like so many others in the general public, would be ashamed to work in an industry of murder and torture.
The most recent expose of Wickham was in December 2003, when animal care volunteers entered the laboratories, and revealed that tests were being carried out using a highly controversial, and partially banned LD50 test to test BOTOX. Botox is a known POISON, so the notion that it could be anything but deadly to the smaller animals it was tested on is anything but logical. In this daring raid, over one hundred mice and rats were resuced from Wickham Labs, some so pumped with the poison that they barely resembled mice at all anymore, most of which were recovered by the police, and returned to Mr Cartmell, only to suffer some more days.
Please remember that the only information that ever comes out of Wickham Labs comes from members of the public who have covertly entered the premises and removed the evidence themselves. The information we have is only the tip of the iceberg. For every scandal, and every cruel experiment, there are countless thousands of others taking place without anyone observing, except for those who wield the scalpels.
