The old black-and-white dog died peacefully in the arms of people who loved him. He had lived well and brought great joy to his family. Toward the end, when his whiskers turned snow-white and his legs got wobbly, he sometimes lost his way about the house, but he never forgot to show his gratitude for the smallest kindness. He was buried with his favorite toy, a green rubber mallet, and a bush of red roses was planted on his grave.

The dog was lucky. There’s no telling how he got there, but in December 1984, he was found lying on the wet cement inside a cage at the City of Hope laboratory in Duarte, California. At the time that someone took pity on him, records showed that more than 50% of dogs used in experiments at Hope had died of such causes as infection, overdoses of chemicals, blood loss, broken catheters, pneumonia, dehydration and lack of post-surgical care. It is doubtful that he would have been alive when, five months after he had been given a new lease on life, the U.S. government moved in and fined the laboratory for violations of federal minimum standards of animal care.

All over the world at this time of year, people open their hearts and their wallets and give to health charities like the City of Hope, to cancer and heart charities and others. Often, donors don’t realize that their money, given with the intention of saving lives, will end up costing animals theirs. It isn’t a few animals, treated kindly, who will be used in experiments to cure diseases that we fear. It is millions upon millions of animals of all kinds, regarded as nothing more than test tubes with whiskers, used casually in every cockamamie—and often painful—experiment imaginable.

I know this not only because I read research protocols and hear whistleblowers’ complaints, but because I used to inspect laboratories. In one top-ranked military lab, I met people who microwaved rabbits for fun. At the largest “showcase” laboratory in the U.S., the National Institutes of Health (which conducts many experiments in conjunction with charities), I came across a beagle whose stitches had burst and whose intestines lay beside her on the floor. The staff had gone home.

When I criticized the lack of basic animal care, the response was often defensive. In fact, in the late ’70s, when I entered the D.C. Commission on Public Health, the head of animal science at George Washington University stopped buying animals from the D.C. pound rather than subject his labs to my mandatory inspections.

By the late ’80s, when I watched videotapes from the University of Pennsylvania showing brain-crash tests on baboons, I wasn’t surprised to hear researchers call a pain-racked monkey “sucker” or watch them strap an injured animal to the operating table and then go out to lunch. I had seen the court exhibit of a baby monkey at one laboratory on whose forehead was tattooed, “Crap.”

If we want good health, we have to stop clinging to the idea that we can cure human diseases by force-feeding, electroshocking, burning, starving and otherwise infecting and abusing animals, whose physiology and metabolism are unarguably different from our own. Given that the results of the very same tests on different animals can vary markedly, no one can guarantee that animal experiments will work in humans. The major killer diseases of humans today are cancer, heart disease and stroke. Despite the billions of animals who have been strapped into smoking devices, the relationship between lung cancer and cigarettes was shown in human epidemiological studies; decades of animal studies were inconclusive. Despite years of inducing heart attacks and strokes in every kind of animal on the face of the Earth, we learned of the danger of high cholesterol levels, the importance of dietary fiber and the pitfalls of consuming animal fats from studying people.

Animal experiments can be replaced. It is not efficient or useful to implant electrodes into the brains of baboons, breed cancer-ridden mice or infect guinea pigs with tuberculosis when we can study whole DNA in human cells and when computer models that can access more than 10 million pieces of information about human beings can quickly predict the effects of drugs. Molecular research allows us to isolate individual human genes for study, and human cells can now be grown outside the body to test drugs and create vaccines. Most importantly, large-scale human population studies are dramatically changing our understanding of the causes of disease.

By letting health charities know that we refuse to subsidize experiments on animals, we can push them into using humane, non-animal research methods. We can help save human lives and liberate animals from laboratories. Like the old dog who gave so much love and was loved so much in return, each animal is precious. It is up to us to make sure that health charities know it. Let’s think and ask questions before we write that check.Here’s a partial list of charities in the U.S., U.K. and Canada that do and that don’t fund animal experiments. For a more complete list, please contact PETA.

Here's a partial list of charities in the U.S., U.K, and Canada that do and don't fund animal experiments. For a more complete list, please contact PETA. Do Fund Animal Tests Alzheimer’s Association (U.S.) American Cancer Society (U.S.) American Heart Association (U.S.) Brain Research Trust (U.K.) Canadian Cancer Society (Canada) Canadian Diabetes Association (Canada) March of Dimes (U.S.) Muscular Dystrophy Association (U.S.) National Kidney Research Fund (U.K.) Don’t Fund Animal Tests AIDS Coalition of Cape Breton (Canada) American Vitiligo Research Foundation (U.S.) Association of Birth Defect Children (U.S.) Children’s Burn Foundation (U.S.) Quest Cancer Research (U.K.) Skin Cancer Foundation (U.S.) Spinal Cord Injury Network (U.S.)