When you donate to conservation or environmental organizations, you might think that your gift will be used only to help animals. In the case of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), you would be wrong. WWF has worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to design and implement a plan to poison and kill as many as 100 million animals in chemical tests.

It’s called the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP), and its stated purpose is to study the impact of chemicals on the body’s hormone system. Under this program, as many as 80,000 chemicals could be tested on animals, causing them absolute agony. But here’s what PETA has learned:

• The tests won’t tell us anything about what might happen to people exposed to the chemicals because the EPA has no intention of establishing the relevance of the animal tests to humans.

• In general, non-animal tests have proved more effective than old-fashioned animal tests. PETA has provided WWF and the EPA with a viable non-animal testing alternative for the EDSP that is more reliable and will provide useful results, helping to protect both people and animals, but they have failed even to consider it.

• The government is good at killing animals and collecting “data”—but not at protecting people. Despite killing hundreds of thousands of animals, it has not banned a single industrial chemical in the last decade, not even those known to be dangerous.

• Here’s the best part: Scientists cannot even agree on what an “endocrine disruptor” is or does!

PETA appealed to WWF to withdraw its support of the testing plan but to no avail: WWF officials testified in favor of animal testing and lobbied Congress for half a billion dollars of additional public funds for this research while at the same time doing nothing to support the development of more accurate non-animal tests. WWF even tried to k0eep EDSP planning meetings closed to the public, perhaps to keep people from hearing statements like this one, made by the WWF representative recently in a discussion regarding one proposed test that could kill as many as 3,000 animals each time it is conducted: “I think that what you want to do is terrific!”

Please help us persuade WWF that there are more effective, cruelty-free ways to keep toxins out of wildlife habitats.