WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT
Animal rights group PETA has condemned the use of live dogs and pigs as test dummies for cruel car crash tests
According to a blog post on the PETA website, experimenters at Research Institute for Traffic Medicine and Daping Hospital regularly fastens 'abused, frightened animals into car seats and crash them into walls until their bodies are bloody, bruised, and mangled'.
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PETA also claims these 'violent experiments' also see experimenters force 'dogs onto an L-shaped rigid seat in a human sitting position using cloth restraints'.
"They then affixed a disc to their heads with a steel wire rope, sewed sensors into their heads, held their heads up by their ears, dropped a hammer to hit the disc (causing the dogs' heads to violently thrust backwards and resulting in whiplash, limping, and difficulty in moving hind limbs), and killed and dissected them," the blog post states.
Referring to the treatment of pigs, the post continues: "Experimenters tied live pigs to a metal sled for eight hours without providing them with water or food, screwed a metal block into their pelvis, inserted electrodes into their abdomen, slammed them into a wall - which caused multiple fractures and severe injuries to the animals' spine, pelvis, and internal organs - and killed and dissected them.
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"Experimenters starved pigs for 24 hours, deprived them of water for six hours, strapped them into a car seat with seat belts and ropes, slammed them into a wall - which caused them to sustain severe fractures, contusions, and lacerations; caused bleeding of their internal organs; and resulted in immediate death for half the animals used - and then dissected them."
Speaking to German newspaper Bild, PETA spokeswoman Anne Meinert slammed the tests.
She said: "Letting intelligent and sensitive animals like pigs crash into walls in high-speed tests in China is simply cruel.
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"It leads to broken bones, internal bruising, lacerations and horrible deaths."
Blasting such practices, PETA argues that there are other alternatives that should be used for car crash research, as opposed to the 'cruel, archaic, and unjustifiable' use of sentient animals.
"These days, companies use advanced technology - such as clinical human studies, advanced computer modelling, 3-D medical imaging, and sophisticated manikins - for their car-crash research," PETA said in its blog post.
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"Other researchers have also used human cadavers and virtual reality (digital crash dummies) for the same purpose. In the 21st century, every car company on the planet should already have adopted these methods."
Featured Image Credit: International Journal of Crashworthiness