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.