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at a figure of 57 million worldwide for these ‘missing’ animals, extrapolated from extremely limited, very variable and out-of-date estimates.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.

If you tend to find online discussions are ruled by 13 year olds using their chat-room jargon and ready for a fight, you may find a new website, Debatewise, is worth checking out. 

Debatewise hopes to foster intelligent debate, by encouraging collaboration and forming sound arguments.  It will be interesting to see if the debate on animal research stimulates fresh opinions on the matter.

You can sign up (for free) and join in on a debate, create a new one, and vote on the issue - it’s a way to directly communicate with and influence the rest of a community seeking informed discussion.

Debatewise hopes to become a place people go to make their minds up about something - from ID cards, to facebook, to the effects of cannabis. So if you feel passionately about an aspect of animal research, add to the debate!

Antivivisection legal challenges seemed to be falling like flies at the moment. Just a week ago the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) lost its long-standing legal challenge against the Home Office on the setting of severity limits—see our earlier blog. And a few months ago the National Anti-Vivisection Society lost its High Court case on the right to advertise on the television—see our blog on that case.

Now we hear that another court case brought about by the actions of the BUAV, this time on freedom of information, has likewise failed. 

The long-running Judicial Review case brought by an antivivisection group against the Home Office has finally ended, with the Court of Appeal ruling against the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) on the final two counts. Nine other counts had previously been rejected by the High Court.

This costly case has been before the courts for nearly four years and this is not the first time we have blogged about it. The two issues subject to the final appeal were:

Is the antivivisection group Europeans for Medical Progress (see for instance this previous blog entry) moderating its message, or just using sloppy language?

In a letter this week to New Scientist, Margaret Clotworthy from EMP says:

‘Europeans for Medical Progress would like to see a comparison between animal tests for drug safety with a panel of state-of-the-art techniques based on human biology. In the UK, 250 members of parliament and 83% of general practitioners support this idea.’

Actually (in EDM 92) 250 MPs supported

‘an independent and transparent scientific evaluation of the use of animals as surrogate humans in drug safety testing and medical research.’

This is a much bigger ask. Comparison of animal safety tests for medicines with new non-animal techniques is already done: it’s called validation. See for instance the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods.

Even more sloppy is the claim that animal research is causing ‘so much grief’ to ‘the majority of the public’. This is all the more surprising as EMP appears so keen on ‘independent evaluation’. Proper public opinion surveys have repeatedly shown that the majority of the public are supportive of animal research. About three quarters can accept animal experimentation so long as it’s for medical purposes or if there is no unnecessary suffering for the animals.

Of course everyone cares about animals (it was an article about the care shown by animal technicians that prompted Clotworthy’s letter) but this doesn’t sound like a lot of grief to me.

Almost hidden by acres of UK media coverage of the (at times hysterical) debate about hybrid human animal embryo research, I was interested to spot a small item about HIV vaccine research. It was in the Financial Times this morning, based on a Reuters report. Last month we blogged about leading scientists calling for HIV vaccine research to go back to basics, including animal research. Now, according to Reuters, the US government has acted:

The US government has announced a major overhaul of its effort to produce an AIDS vaccine, stressing a return to basic scientific research after the failure of a key clinical trial last year.

Government officials at a summit with AIDS scientists pledged to prioritise spending on lab work and animal tests rather than expensive, and thus far disappointing, large-scale vaccine trials on humans. ‘We need to turn the knob in the direction of discovery. That is unambiguous,’ said Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who convened the meeting outside of Washington.

Let’s hope, for the sake of patients, that sense will also prevail in our current scientific/political/ethical/religious/media preoccupation with hybrid embryo research.

There is every indication that the more sophisticated and nuanced debate about the future challenges of animal research, which we have been hoping for, can materialise.

Last month our new Chairman, Professor Colin Blakemore, outlined in profile in the Times Higher Education Supplement the new approach to the debate which RDS will take.

This was followed up by an article in the New Statesman online by the Director of the RDS outlining the challenges ahead.

Finally, a detailed and extensive editorial has been published (as a pdf) in Alternatives to Laboratory Animals (which is the Journal of the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments) outlining how we see the new arguments unfolding.

With many of the animal rights extremists in jail or awaiting sentencing, now is the time to improve all aspects of the debate, and of course the science, 3Rs and animal welfare as well.