For almost 100 years the Research Defence Society has been explaining why we need to use animals in medical research. In our time, we have seen some pretty pitiful attacks on animal research by anti-vivisection and extremist groups. But the recent speech by Alastair Currie of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) at the Oxford Union Society debate, posted on BUAV’s website, really takes the biscuit for awful arguments.

By the third paragraph, Alistair is describing animal research as being equivalent to the ‘morality of the thief’. Presumably the comparison is obvious to him, but he makes little attempt to explain it. The fact that animal research is lawful, highly regulated and subject to frequent unannounced inspections seems to us to make it somewhat different to theft. How many thieves apply to the Home Office for a licence! And the fact that the benefits of animal research fall to the whole of society, in particular to sick and vulnerable people, makes the comparison with the selfish thief even more bizarre. Just how much thought went into this by Alistair, we have to ask.

At the end of the same paragraph, Alastair Currie likens animal research to Stalinism. Alastair has been heard recently on the news complaining that the Government won’t meet with the BUAV. The Government has consistently stated its belief that animal research has helped to save the lives of hundreds of millions of people, for example in the 2004 report Animal Welfare – Human Rights: protecting people from animal rights extremists. But BUAV thinks that it is more like the slaughter of millions of innocent people carried out by Stalin. One wonders what common ground there could possibly be between BUAV and the Government for a constructive meeting!