Here’s an interesting question. Does the use of non-sentient animals, such as worms and fruit flies, constitute an ‘alternative’ to experiments which would otherwise cause harm to sentient animals? The majority of scientists would answer yes.

But not the antivivisectionists, who oppose any use of animals - even slugs and snails. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) responded to Gordon Brown’s speech this week by calling for more of the £15 billion spent on medical research in the UK to be diverted to so-called ‘brave new humane’ methods, i.e. non-animal methods.

BUAV is obviously not thinking of the type of research revealed this week in the Independent, in which scientists have developed a technique to screen drug treatments using fruit flies. With further research, this innovative breakthrough could save time and money in drug development for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as save the mice used in such tests. 

The technique involves injecting into fruit fly embryos a human gene for a disease of the central nervous system, such as Alzheimer’s, plus a gene from jellyfish that emits blue and green light. When the flies hatch, the affected part of their brains can be seen to emit a blue light. If the blue light flashes to green after the flies are fed the drug, the drug can be taken forward. As fruit flies hatch within days, results can be seen more quickly than with mice. And flies only need a fraction of the drug, so testing is cheaper.

But the BUAV shows no interest in such promising research. Indeed, the less ‘appealing’ invertebrates are rarely acknowledged at all by the antivivisectionists, either by recognizing their enormous potential in biomedical research, or by campaigning against their use. No ‘Save the Slugs’ banners from BUAV. Are they guilty of ‘speciesism’ in the science of alternatives, we wonder?

In an article posted on Guardian’s comment is free, Michelle Thew, Chief Executive of the antivivisection group BUAV, claims that the European commission ’broke it promise to improve the protection of animals used in research when it pulled out of publishing its proposal for the revision of 20-year-old animal testing rules‘.

But that’s not the interesting bit. Michelle makes her argument supposedly on behalf of the majority of people in the UK who ’want to live in a world where nobody wants or believes we need to experiment on animals‘.  But why stop with the UK? Since she is also chief executive of the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments she can presumably now talk on behalf of all of Europe. And that she tries to do.

Its close association with the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) hasn’t stopped the Dr Hadwen Trust, in its latest report, Let down by Labour, striking a blow against BUAV’s current campaign to ban the testing of household products on animals.

‘Let down by Labour’ claims any success of the household product testing campaign will have ‘negligible benefit to animals’, and talks about the need for the Labour party to shift away from such ‘meaningless wins’. We blogged about the report last month. We agree about negligible benefit for animals, considering that government figures for 2007 show just one procedure (on a rabbit) to test a household product, which is one more than the previous year.

BUAV’s campaign to ban testing on household products appears to be a main focus of its activities, with its website promoting it, in addition to a dedicated website, and press releases singing the praises of the companies who have opted to ‘go cruelty free’ - notably the Co-op and Marks and Spencer. It currently has 171 signatures for its parliamentary petition calling for a ban - EDM 1215, which it talks about in its recent news.

You would perhaps think the antivivisection groups would be a little more supportive of each other, and avoid putting out such mixed messages, if they want to attract public support.

Some of us have been watching with interest a court challenge relating to primate research in Switzerland. A few months ago, researchers appealed to the Zurich administrative court against a decision from the Swiss Health Department not to approve a basic research project to be done in macaque monkeys.

But according to the Scientific American magazine, in a surprise ruling, the court upheld the original verdict, citing in part the macaque’s evolutionary proximity to humans and its cognitive abilities. Long-term objectives and uncertain applications are unacceptable, the court ruled.

We reported last month on the estimate of worldwide laboratory animal use published by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV).

Antivivisectionists have always found the numbers of animals a useful campaigning tool, since it represents something to attack. They would appear to have an interest in keeping the figure as high as possible. As we reported in June this year, some of the changes the antivivisectionists would like to see to European legislation on animal experimentation would cause a massive increase in recorded animal numbers.

Now our Director has given a critique of the antivivisection guesswork on the Guardian science blog. Feel free to add your own comments.

The Dr Hadwen Trust, an ‘alternatives’ charity, has released a somewhat aggressive report on the apparent failure of the Labour government to stay true to their 1996 pre-election pledges on animal research. The report can be downloaded from their website here. With the Trust starting to release more ‘campaigning’ material, they risk undermining any scientific credibility they may have had, and indeed their charitable status.

The report – an 11-year ‘bash the government’ review – quotes a figure of 0.00002% as ‘Britain’s science budget spent on government funding of non-animal replacements’. It claims that the government-funded NC3Rs spends just £193,646 annually on replacement research. It says this is a proportion of the NC3Rs’ gross research spend for 2006 of £268,990. However, if you look at actual NC3Rs funding in 2006, you’ll notice a much larger figure than this for the projects it funded – totalling just over £1.4 million. The report does not say where the Trust got its figures for the NC3Rs spend from. 

Do numbers matter? Key questions for the public are: how is animal research conducted, what are the scientific and medical benefits and how well is it regulated? If these questions can be answered satisfactorily, I’m not convinced that they are too interested in the scale of animal research, ie the numbers of animals used.

However, a small item in today’s Guardian newspaper reports on an estimate for annual worldwide laboratory animal use that totals 115 million. The figure comes from a paper by antivivisectionists in the current issue of the journal ATLA published by the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Research.  Unfortunately it is not freely available online, but I found a few minutes to read it.

There are fundamental questions about the way the antivivisectionists have collected and analysed their statistics. They include animals that are bred, but not used in research – so called ‘surplus’ animals – and animals that are bred and humanely killed so that their tissues and organs may be used in research. There is likely to be considerable overlap between the two, and both are excluded from the statistics published by the UK government, which regulates the use of living vertebrate animals in research. The authors also include in their ‘missing animals’ category GM animals used for breeding. They claim that except for two countries, these are not included in official estimates.

The authors arrive at a figure of 57 million worldwide for these ‘missing’ animals, extrapolated from extremely limited, very variable and out-of-date estimates. Yet this figure makes up more half of their estimated total of 115 million animals in research worldwide, a figure they know the media will pick up as the topline result.

The 2007 annual report of the Animals Scientific Procedures Inspectorate (ASPI) shows a number of infringements relating to animal welfare. Whilst obviously not wishing to diminish the gravity of these, it is reassuring that the regulatory system is working and they do not get ignored.

The care of the animals in question was not up to the required standards for a variety of reasons, from not being fed to inadequate housing during refurbishment. However, nearly two thirds of the infringements were minor technical issues and did not lead to extra suffering. It is because of the strict regulations in place and the high welfare standards we have that such reports are detailed.

RDS has long accepted the need for continuous improvement in the design and analysis of all types of research. This goes especially for animal research, which is our area of concern and has ethical indications. The concept is partly enshrined in one of the 3Rs, namely ‘reduction’, which implies getting the most useful information out of research projects whilst using the least number of animals.

The group SABRE has launched a website to ‘facilitate discussion about the methods used to design and evaluate animal studies in medical research’. We support such attempts at dialogue, and hope it takes off. So far there are few posts.

SABRE includes links to a number of references, which it points out are not endorsed by the group. This raises an interesting question. We clicked on four references at random, and three of them were by Andrew Knight—a well-known antivivisectionist. All were claiming to be systematic reviews which demonstrate that animal models don’t work. This individual is hardly likely to come to any other conclusion.

The whole point of systematic reviews is to use a defined methodology to improve the analysis of existing research, so as to ensure a better foundation for future research. At some stage we could need a methodology to sort the poorly-conducted reviews from the rigorous ones!

Number 10 Downing Street recently responded to an antivivisection-inspired e-petition calling on the Prime Minister to ‘ignore the petition that supports animal testing.’

It continued ‘because if they bothered to investigate hard enough they would already know that a) there are modern and more effective methods like computer models and tissue research and b) that 92% of drugs tested on animals are still found to be inappropriate for humans....’ This e-petition got 386 signatures by mid-June.

We blogged the 92% nonsense here, and have addressed the pseudoscience around so-called ‘alternatives’ many times.

The original pro-research petition got over 3,000 signatures and called on the government to support animal research - we blogged the very supportive government response to that here.

It now looks very likely that the revision of the European Directive on animal experimentation will be further delayed, perhaps beyond autumn 2008. This is creating all sorts of anguish among the animal rights groups. The Dr Hadwen Trust, an antivivisectionist funder of non-animal research, has blamed this on the European Commissioner for Research, as well as on ‘sustained pressure from animal research industry lobbyists’.

In fact the antivivisectionists have only themselves to blame. By deluging both European Commission officials and Parliamentarians with misleading, distorted and inaccurate information about animal research, they have created a situation where the draft revised directive is not of high enough quality to proceed.

Contrary to the usual accusations from animal rights groups, industry representatives in Europe have long made it clear that they welcome efforts to revise the Directive. Industry clearly supports more harmonisation of some key requirements – amongst them ethical review – since this makes the conduct of business easier and will have a positive effect on animal welfare throughout the community.

Regardless of any delay, ongoing improvements to animal welfare continue to be a priority for animal research users across Europe.

Okay—this title is misleading. Deliberately so, to illustrate a point.

In April this year the animal rights group ‘Animal Defenders International’ (ADI) launched a new ‘manifesto’ for changes to the European Directive, with a press release on their website. One of the proposals was for the Directive to be extended to cover all invertebrates, foetal and embryonic animals, as well as animals killed for organs, or as surplus to requirements. This would undoubtedly lead to a massive increase in recorded animal numbers.

RDS has argued for some time that the narrow obsession of the animal rights groups in the UK with the annual statistics is pointless. The numbers simply depend on what is being measured, rather than give a meaningful indication of animal suffering, which is the main concern to us all.

We wonder if ADI will notice the glaring contradiction between the increases that would result from their proposals, and the ‘reduction targets’ which MEPs with an animal rights agenda will undoubtedly argue for. That is probably optimistic!

Antivivisection groups are finding the revision of the European Directive on animal experimentation an ideal platform for their campaigning agenda, especially with the decline in animal rights extremism.

Their claims are getting no less absurd. In an interview for the BBC World Service Analysis programme on Wednesday, Dr Jane Goodall suggests that researchers have some kind of ‘schizophrenia’ because they experiment on dogs in ‘sometimes a rather callous and brutal way’, yet go home to their pet dog. She presumably used the example of dogs because of the one time that animal technicians were uncovered mistreating a dog. Yet she might just as well suggest that because it is possible to find some children who are mistreated, that all parents are violent schizophrenics.

Gill Langley of the Dr Hadwen Trust does no better. She claims that the results of animal experiments ‘are really very difficult to interpret for humans’. But she then suggests instead that computer simulations can be used to ‘scale up’ cell culture data ‘so that findings from cell tests can be used to predict what would happen in the whole human body’. Which cells you might ask. But it is scarcely worth debating such scientific illiteracy. 

The media needs to be seen to be balanced and impartial. That is why minority pressure groups get so much media coverage for their views. It is an inevitable part of a free and fair democracy that those who challenge the status quo get their voice heard.

But it is also frustrating in the debate about animal research that those with little relevant expertise get quoted as if they had equivalent status of those carrying out the research and caring for the animals. This is why it is easy to look at the Guardian article about experiments on monkeys and wonder why the first quotes are attributed to Dr Jane Goodall, somebody who opposes research on non-human primates for scientific medical benefit, but by her own admission is no expert in that field.

This simply reflects the fact that such work is controversial, and does have ethical aspects which say something about how we as a society look after animals. It is the opposition to the course of action which makes it newsworthy in the first place.

As we pointed out in our last blog, the onus is on us—the research community—to make (and keep making) the case for properly regulated and humanely conducted animal research. Please feel free to add any comments to the Guardian blog on this topic, which as is often the case, is dominated by the antivivisectionists.

We agree wholeheartedly with the opinion in this online commentary site ‘Sacbee.com’. It states that:

The onus remains on researchers to explain why animals should be used and to assure the public they have taken steps to minimize suffering. To that end, they must be committed to public disclosure of their research and treatment of animals.

The good news is that there is considerably more openness amongst UK research institutions than a few years ago. This partly reflects declining animal rights extremism. But it also reflects a growing irritation at the mis-portrayal of the reality of animal research from antivivisection groups. Carefully conducted, ethically justified humane animal research to advance scientific knowledge and develop new treatments and cures is something to be proud of—and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Let us stand up for good science.