Remembering Sir Christopher Lee

Posted by on June 11, 2015 | Permalink

Christopher Lee©starmaxinc.com

Sir Christopher Lee passed away on Sunday. He was widely known for his dramatic roles as villains, including Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Saruman in Lord of the Rings and Count Dooku in Star Wars, but in real life, he was a hero for animals.

Sir Christopher supported a PETA campaign against vivisection funded by health charities. He was outspoken about experiments on dogs and cats that were so horrific that they might even have made the horror characters he portrayed shudder.

The experiments in question, funded by the British Heart Foundation, included cutting open animals’ chests and circulating their blood out of their bodies and back in again, cutting away their blood vessels and nerves and then implanting electrodes in them, skinning their back legs and inserting tubes into their necks and legs before shocking them and injecting them with sodium cyanide.

In a radio advertisement that he recorded for PETA, he said:

Out of desperation comes the call for help. You respond instinctively. You try to help. But instead of saving a life, you cause suffering and death for not one but thousands.

When you donate money to the British Heart Foundation, you could fund cruel, pointless experiments on animals. Shouldn’t your contribution help end suffering, not cause it?

We join in mourning his passing. It was a privilege to work with him on our campaign to end cruel heart-disease experiments on animals. In memory of Sir Christopher, please don’t support charities such as the British Heart Foundation that hurt and kill animals.