SIR – ‘Imagine donating your body to science while you are still in it’, reads the slogan on an antivivisection poster.

Such a prospect may well fill us with horror but, sadly, it is a daily reality for the millions of animals used as disposable tools of the trade in vivisection laboratories worldwide. For laboratory animals there is no informed consent, no potential benefit and all that awaits them is a life of incarceration and suffering and, if they are lucky, an early death.

Improving human health and alleviating human suffering does not depend on animal experiments.

Indeed, if the vast amount of money, time and effort expended on this archaic, cruel and unreliable method of research was directed towards methods that are directly relevant to humans, for example clinical studies, autopsies, tissue and cell cultures, humans as well as animals would benefit.

H HANDY, Malvern.