ALONG with the majority of the population, I welcomed recent moves to eradicate hunting with hounds. Yet on the same issue of animal experimentation -- particularly that of medical research -- most choose to ignore the hypocrisy of a 'civilisation' which allows hundreds of millions of other sentient beings to be sacrificed for our dubious benefit.

The simply truth is that animal testing is unnecessary and unreliable.

Taking healthy beings from a completely different species, artificially inducing a condition, keeping them in an unnatural and highly stressed environment, then trying to apply the results to humans is, to say the least, seriously flawed.

Many drugs, passed as safe in animal test have damaged many humans and killed others.

Why then do animal experiments continue? Animals are cheap, readily available, have no voice of their own, and because vivisection is a huge industry in which many have a vested interest.

Testing on animals has become a ritual to mitigate the dangers of legal liability for the manufacturers of new drugs.

Every year in British laboratories about three million animals are mutilated in the name of science -- poisoned, scalded, wounded, blinded, brain-damaged and given lethal diseases -- two-thirds receiving no anaesthetic during these procedures.

The suffering is so needless when far more effective methods of research are available.

Vivisection is not a choice between animals and people -- it is a choice between humane research and that which is cruel and ineffective.

IRENE FOGARTY (Mrs), Beech Avenue, Anderton, Chorley.