I just picked up a nice story on blood transfusion, from the BBC kids’ programme Newsround, of all places (well, they did a good piece on mice in glue ear research last week).

Apparently a new animal donor register has just been set up. The story of how it came into being is on the register’s website:

Oxford University has won a ruling that the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) press officer, Robin Webb, should be bound by an injunction made by Oxford Crown Court banning certain protests. The injunction provides Oxford University and its students, staff, contractors and suppliers with much needed legal protection from animal rights intimidation, harassment and abuse.

The judge ruled that Mr Webb is a propagandist and not a journalist and that he made a ‘conscious contribution to the fear sought to be exercised by the ALF and associated groupings upon the University of Oxford’. The Guardian website reported that the judge ruled that the ALF press office is a vital part of the ALF’s strategy and that one of the key weapons of this movement is fear.

The court was shown video evidence from a Dispatches documentary from 1998 in which Webb explained how to make incendiary devices. It was high time that the ALF’s tactical claim, that it does not exist as a group and therefore cannot be bound by the injunction, was dismissed. The judge said that the ALF was a ‘coherent organisation which could therefore be represented in legal action’.

This ruling is very encouraging and should prevent similar extremist organisations from using such legal tricks in trying to create a climate of fear and intimidation. Organisations like the ALF are not outside the law and their supporters are responsible for their actions to the courts.

This week’s In the Know magazine (October 10, pages 18-19) has an article about animal research featuring an articulate, intelligent trainee barrister who happens to be diabetic. Lisa says:

Before insulin was discovered, diabetes would be a death sentence. I wouldn’t be here today if scientists hadn’t tested on animals. I know it’s not ideal but it’s the only way forward in many cases. I’d always put the life of a human above an animal.’

I think most people would agree. This presents a dilemma for antivivisection and animal rights groups. They cannot deny that the most people – vegans aside – do not accord animals the same rights as humans. So they either deny the evidence of history – eg the key role of Banting, Best and a dog called Marjorie in the discovery and development of insulin – or claim that animals are no longer necessary in medical research.

The In The Know article outlines the story of insulin and other animal-research-dependent medical advances. So what case does the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection make against animal research in this article? They resort to a string of distortions and blatant lies. Here’s the worst example:

‘… only about 20% of experiments are for medical purposes. Others are for products such as household cleaners, fertilisers and petrol.’

Petrol??? I don’t know where they got that one from.

The animal experimentation figures are publicly available, if a little complex (that’s why we provide an accessible summary on the RDS website). But using some simple arithmetic, it’s clear that the safety testing of household products and agricultural chemicals together added up to just 1.2% of all animal experiments in 2005.

Tests on non-medical products are a very small percentage of animal use. In fact 96% of all the animal procedures in 2005 were used for some form of biomedical research – basic and applied research, medicines development, and testing of new medical and veterinary products.

The incoming director of BUAV, if she is at all concerned about the truth, has a big clean-up job to do.

It’s a great day when the antis show how painfully aware they are of their shortcomings, see Beyond bunnies “Say some killer points and then shut up".

How the tables have turned!  Apparently defending animal research is the ‘easy job’ (since when?!), and

‘This thing is deliberately being turned into a PR war by a pro-vivisectionist lobby that see themselves as on the defensive for too long. That’s dangerous: clever people + emotional blackmail + lots of money to spend on “education” (as Aziz said) = trouble for the Manns & Broughtons of this world.’
[Comment 3]

Ha ha!  We’re turning this into a PR war?!  My irony-meter just blew.

The blog itself had some spectacular sour grapes: because they perceive ‘our’ side as coming off better in the media, it must be because ‘we’ have cheated in some way (and not because irrational people who are blinded by their sense of right are illogical and scary):

‘Intensive media coaching from the slick and over-funded RDS has no doubt helped here’

Tut tut, stop sucking that lemon - as Iain Simpson pointed out (Comment 6) that RDS has never provided media training for him or Tipu as alleged in the blog.  It’s nice that Beyond bunnies is so impressed by ‘our’ efforts that s/he thinks we’re slick, but since when has RDS been over-funded?  NAVS and BUAV each have five times the level of funding of RDS, and we’ve spent the best-part of the last 100 years fighting our corner alone.

In a letter published by The Observer on Sunday, antivivisectionist Richard Mountford of Animal Aid (for some reason he doesn’t mention his affiliation) tries to align pro-life and antivivisection campaigning:

It is absurd for so-called right-to-life campaigners to object to medical research on cells from dead human embryos, when they do not object to research on live animals (’Scientists turn dead cells into live tissue’, News, last week). They may feel squeamish about using human cells, but that is not a moral argument.
Richard Mountford, letter in The Observer, 1 October 2006

So far so good. But then he states that: ‘thousands of animals suffer in experiments every day in British laboratories’ and says we should invest in stem cell research and ‘stop using cruel animal tests’. Most scientists agree that suffering should be minimised, and I do not believe that animal tests can be characterised as cruel.

But the main point is that stem cell research and stem cell therapies depend very much on animal research, particularly research involving mice. And arguably we would not have progressed very far in this field if it weren’t for Dolly the sheep. Animal Aid seems to inhabit a fact-free zone.

For more evidence on the importance of animals in this research, look no further than the RDS web page Stem cell therapies and mouse research. 

There have been many reports that a virulent strain of the ‘superbug’ C difficile has killed 49 people in Leicester hospitals this year.

This is relevant to the well-worn antivivisection mantra ‘pencillin is a useful antibiotic for people but kills guinea pigs’. Partially true, but the devil is in the detail which they don’t tell you.

In fact, early studies showed that ‘good’ bacteria normally present in the guinea-pig intestine are sensitive to penicillin. So, after penicillin, all these bacteria disappear and are replaced by greater numbers of some types of ‘bad’ bacteria – eg Clostridium difficile. This can lead to absorption of toxins and may cause death from blood poisoning. It seems that guinea pigs, far from being strikingly different from humans, are in fact very similar and provided a clear warning that penicillin could cause colitis or worse in vulnerable patients on long-term penicillin.  More information on the RDS website.

In New Labour’s pre-1997 election leaflet New Life for Animals, the party made a range of statements that raised expectations amongst the animal protection community.

How times have changed amongst Labour party members themselves. The Times reported

Lord Drayson, the Defence Minister, became the first major speaker to be heckled at this year’s Labour conference. The former vaccine research company chief turned politician was criticising actions of animal rights extremists when the heckler branded medical researchers ‘abusers’ and labelled as ‘rubbish’ claims that animal testing was necessary. Lord Drayson - who in 1993 founded PowderJect Pharmaceuticals plc in Oxford which specialised in the production of vaccines - told delegates that animal extremism was the ‘one subject that got me into politics’. ‘I was chairman of the biotech industry association when violent attacks on scientists working in my industry became intense,’ he added when the heckler called out ‘abusers’. The heckler called out again but was drowned out by applause for Lord Drayson from the audience. Stewards in the conference hall looked on nervously but resisted challenging the heckler.

So we have gone from unthinking opposition, to open debate, with a clear majority supporting responsible animal use. That sounds like a healthy, informed democracy to me, the one thing antivivisectionists really fear!

At a joint BUAV/Muslim Council of Britain event on extremism at this year Labour Party Conference in Manchester it was interesting to see certain elements of the animal rights movement vying for the limelight.

Both of these organisations - although they have supporters from very different backgrounds - have to deal with similar problems including how to tackle extremism amongst their members. Extremists in general share common views: they have an ideological world view, they strongly believe in conspiracy theories and they reject the democratic process of politics. And of course every extremist group is media aware and loves publicity stunts.

At the beginning of this particular meeting an animal rights activist - clad symbolically in a black cloak - disrupted proceedings by shouting ‘why should we stop direct action when we are so successful with it.’ Hmm … honest enough you may think but later I heard him defending privately the ‘shooting of Lord Sainsbury or Colin Blakemore’. This kind of direct action seems to imply a very particular brand of insight - BUAV is an organisation on their side!  BUAV and other animal rights organisations are desperate to repair the damage done to their image by detrimental acts by such extremist activists.

An old report and a recent diary alert by animal rights group SPEAK show that numbers at their demo on 22 April this year are subject to an annual inflation rate of at least 50%. The very few press reports immediately after the event suggested that about 1,000 turned up; not 1,200 as SPEAK reported then, or 1,500 as they now have it. Maybe they just can’t add up.

Approximately 1200 animal rights campaigners massed in Oxford city centre as a part of the ongoing and successful campaign against Oxford University’s planned animal torture lab and to mark World Day for Laboratory Animals. April report.

And despite all this, the campaign has continued and grown. In April this year 1,500 protesters marched through the streets of Oxford to oppose the lab and support the campaign. September report.

How long before they say their April 2006 demo attracted 2,000 protesters?

The sentencing of Joseph Harris for three years after pleading guilty to three charges of animal rights related criminal damage is to be welcomed. Harris is now the first person to be convicted under the Serious and Organised Crime Act, brought in by the Government last July to tackle harassment and threats from animal rights extremists - as described on the BBC News website.

What are more than a little perplexing are Harris’s justifications for his actions. Harris was apparently a doctor of molecular biology who had been working on a treatment for pancreatic cancer at Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. His lawyers stated that his girlfriend had threatened to dump him because his research was leading him to the point where he was going to have to test his findings on animals, and that he found himself facing a moral dilemma because of his beliefs.

If one takes these surreal explanations as justification, then it’s clearly open season for anyone who doesn’t like their work or fears their lover’s moods to trash property and threaten people. If Harris didn’t like what he was doing, then there were plenty of jobs elsewhere.

Harris’s warped moral stance needs some serious attention; luckily he now has a lot of time on his hands to contemplate it.

Anyone who has followed the debate about the use of animals in research for some time may recall a bizarre claim by the anti-vivisectionist Vernon Coleman, who wrote a column for the Sunday People. He insists, right up to this day on his website, that it is ‘official’ that animal experiments don’t work. This claim was made on the basis that no one responded to his challenge to find just one person whose life had been saved by animal experiments. The challenge went on for some time, and anti-vivisectionists still refer to it in their letters to us.

It goes without saying that Vernon Coleman himself was going to be the judge of whether this challenge had been met. It never seemed to dawn on Coleman that no one would take seriously such a ridiculous publicity stunt. He convinced himself that there was some kind of desparate search by the scientific community to find such a patient. As a result of all this, he came to the deluded belief that the failure of anyone to respond to this challenge amounted to an ‘official’ admission that animal experimentation does not work. We all watched, perplexed, as the farce played itself out.

Now we have an equally bizarre claim from the group Europeans for Medical Progress (EMP) to amuse us. EMP claim to have ‘won’ the only debate on animal experimentation in which an ‘official’ vote was taken. We can only assume that they are referring to the students’ union debate at Sheffield University, which they recently highlighted as having won. Much as we admire Sheffield University, which carries out high quality animal research, we struggle to work out exactly what is meant by the ‘official’ nature of this vote.

And there’s another small detail. Votes were taken at the student union debates on animal research at Oxford University in 2006, as well as Durham University in 2005, both of which went overwhelmingly in favour of animal research. So the claim is not even accurate. As it happens, EMP did not take part in any of those debates. Perhaps that’s the point. EMP have already rejected the views of all credible scientific organisations around the world of the medical benefits of animal research. So to them, like Vernon Coleman, ‘official’ must simply mean anything they agree with! Hardly worth the effort of making the claim.

Three of the 6 SHAC USA activists were sentenced (all six were convicted some months ago) of using their web site to incite threats and harassment against Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) in the US, as reported in Science magazine. It’s great to see that intimidatory, violent and often illegal behavior will not be tolerated either in the USA or the UK. Many animal rights extremists have seen the USA as some bolt hole or safe haven for their activities, believing that the US authorities would pay them little heed. The judgments handed out by the federal jury in Trenton New Jersey this week should be a wake up call that there are no free lunches, vegan or not, boys and girls.

Oxford City Council has, for the first time, voted on a motion about Oxford Uni’s biomedical research facility.  It was a victory for common sense and reasoned debate. Liberal Democrat city councillor Richard Huzzey said:

The issue of medical research using animals is important for everyone living in Oxford. It seems odd the city council hasn’t addressed it before.

The overwhelming majority of councillors took an opinion that easing human suffering and saving human lives justified animal research.

I suspect that mirrors most Oxford residents’ feelings, but we are keen to encourage discussion.

I think the council has a role in creating a climate where this issue can be debated peacefully and intimidation and violence are shunned by all sides.

Oxford Mail, ‘Council backs animal testing’ by Giles Sheldrick, 26th August 2006

The fact that the ‘overwhelming majority of councillors’ support Oxford is another crippling blow (following Pro-Test and the People’s Petition, both grassroots movements) to one of the antivivs’ core beliefs – that they represent that majority of the public, particularly in a LibDem constituency.  This highlights again how far-removed from reality this belief actually is.

As for the extremists responsible for the harassment of individuals and companies, the burning of a College boathouse, and the threats against ‘anyone connected with Oxford University’, it is heartening to see that intimidation and violent protest are increasingly giving way to rational discussion – long may the trend continue.

It is always fascinating to see how antivivisection groups jump on the results of animal behaviour research to push their case that animals are morally equivalent to humans. For example, the latest report by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), The Use of Primates in Experiments supposedly

‘explains the latest knowledge about the significant capacities of non-human primates - capacities once thought to be unique to humans’.

The report claims, for example, that

‘many primates share with humans the ability to remember past events, to have desires, to anticipate and plan for future events, to communicate, form concepts and have complex emotional and social experiences’.

We have no doubt that much of this is true. But we certainly wouldn’t take the word of the antivivisectionists alone. After all, for over 100 years they have simply rejected all evidence of the medical and scientific benefits of animal research, yet accept uncritically any animal behaviour research which apparently supports their position.

It’s been a year since the Halls announced that they would close Darley Oaks, and the past 12 months have witnessed many changes for the better as discussed in an article by Stephen Pincock, ‘Research winning war with extremists, says group’, The Scientist, 23rd August 2006.

As with many online articles, comments may be submitted and I was bored by the same old drivel being spouted by the same old people: Andre Menache (Animal Aid, humiliated on the Oxford Gossip chat forum); Chris Pedler (British Anti-Vivisection Association); Pat Rattigan (British Anti-Vivisection Association as well as an HIV, Sept 11, and Moon Landings sceptic according to his website).  As usual all made false claims about the scientific validity of animal research and other unsupported statements: