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.

Claims from animal rights activists against animal research tend to be along a similar vein, geared to undermining the science.  In a recent blog entry, a scientist/doctor going by the name of Orac sets out the facts to counter the pseudoscience used by animal rights groups – eg that animal testing can’t give us information of value or reliability, and animal models are inferior to other research techniques.  It’s nice to see a face in the research community setting some of the myths straight. 

Respectful Insolence blog: Bad scientific arguments in the service of ‘animal rights’ activism

We are well aware that some Members of the European Parliament have been misled by animal rights misinformation into thinking that animal research does not work and should be phased out. But some MEPs are themselves the origin of such misinformation.

On his English language blog, the Swedish MEP Jens Holm describes his ‘passions’ as ’global justice, animal rights and environmental issues‘. Note the lack of interest in the well-being of individual people.

Jens Holm describes what he anticipates to be ’difficult struggle against animal experimentation‘. During the revision of the European Directive on animal experimentation, Jens Holm is going to be pressing for ‘concrete plans for reduction’. His rationale is that:

‘in the same way that we have goals in the area of climate change, we should set goals for reducing animal experimentation year for year’.

This is confused thinking. Animal research is an activity which brings benefits both to humans and animals. Climate change is an unwanted by-product of industrial and consumer activity, and brings no benefits of itself.

Advocating targets to reduce animal experiments is like suggesting we tackle climate change through targets to reduce rail travel.

The logical focus of Holm’s concerns should be reducing animal suffering, which is a perfectly sensible. In that case, his goal should be targets to reduce animal suffering from all causes, including all human and animal activities. Whether the EU has the legal capacity for that is another matter!

On Wednesday 12 March the Lords Appeal Court dismissed an appeal by the animal rights organisation Animal Defenders International (ADI) against a ban on a proposed advertisement on television.

ADI is the international campaigning wing of the National Anti Vivisection Society. In 2005 it launched a campaign entitled ‘My Mate’s a Primate’. It was refused permission to advertise on television by the responsible body—the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre. Advertisements are banned if they are of a ‘political nature’.

One of the Lords described the proposed advertisement as showing an animal’s cage, in which a chained girl gradually emerges from the shadows into view; the screen goes black and the following messages appear: ‘A chimp has the mental age of a 4 year old’; ‘Although we share 98% of our genetic makeup they are still caged and abused to entertain us’; ‘Please help us to stop their suffering by making a donation today’; the final shot is of a monkey in a cage in exactly the same position as the girl was in.

The Lords recognised that drawing a line inevitably means that ‘hard cases will arise falling on the wrong side of it, but that should not be held to invalidate the rule if, judged in the round, it is beneficial’.

It was further commented that:

‘It takes little imagination to understand how powerful this [advertisement] would be… They can seek to put their case across in any other way, but not the one which so greatly risks distorting the public debate’

RDS took no position on this court case. We recognise both the right to freedom of expression in the UK, and the limitations of that right as decreed by the law. One of the Lords pointed out that those laws were there to stop the ‘mischief’ of partial political advertising. ADI is complaining bitterly that it has been ’gagged‘. At least we are now spared the mischief of distorted and misleading TV advertisements from animal rights groups like ADI.

RDS is an organisation which seeks wide consensus about the need for well-justified, properly regulated, scientifically valid and humanely conducted animal research. For this reason we have no problem with the suggestion by Robert Matthews in the latest edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that:

‘Animal models can and have provided many crucial insights that have led to major advances in medicine and surgery’.

This is very close to our position in any case. Our keynote article in the Journal of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) setting out the ethical aspects of animal research makes the similar assertion that:

‘Animal research has had a vital role in many scientific and medical advances of the past century and continues to aid our understanding of various diseases’.

The government responded very positively yesterday to an e-petition which asked the Prime Minister to ‘demonstrate support for animal research’ (we blogged on this e-petition last February). The response ran to over 450 words. It even thanked signatories: ‘Thank you for signing the e-petition calling for continued support for animal research’ and welcomed ‘the support this petition voices concerning research and testing using animals in this country.’

The main message of the response was to recognise the need for animal research to make advances in medicine:

The antivivisection groups have been strangely quiet about the European Commission’s response, released last week, to the Parliament’s Declaration on primate research. But perhaps it’s not so strange; no doubt the antiviv groups would prefer that such sensible and considered conclusions are buried, given that they would be very difficult to spin.

The Commission recognised that limited use of primates is imperative in particular biomedical research fields, including infectious disease such as malaria and neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s. Of course replacement should be the ultimate goal, but it is simply not possible at present.

The Commission said:

RDS has made clear its support for the concept and practice of systematic reviews. These can help inform how animal studies may be improved and interpreted for the benefit of human health.

Unfortunately, systematic reviews are not a panacea. Some of the published systematic reviews have been so highly selective that their findings had limited relevance, as discussed on a previous blog entry. In other cases animal data is too diverse to make the reviews meaningful. And for much basic research, the objective is not to predict the outcomes of human trials, but to discover new knowledge, whether relevant to humans, animals or the environment.

For these reasons, RDS unfortunately cannot support the current e-petition to the Prime Minister by the organisation known as SABRE. This petition would require, amongst other things, that each licence application includes references to systematic reviews of existing relevant studies. This is simply not practical. How can an application for a new piece of work make reference to a non-existent systematic review?

RDS will be engaging in a number of ways during 2008 in the debate about how to improve experimental design and encourage systematic reviews. It’s a shame a little more thought had not gone into the wording of what could otherwise have been a sensible proposal.

Perhaps this article about PETA (the US animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is a little too crude for us. RDS is calling for a more sophisticated debate, after all.

But there are certainly many people out there who think that PETA has far too much influence over young children. They are concerned that PETA is a cult-like organisation which brainwashes kids with bizarre beliefs.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Bryan Brasher has certainly gone for the option of openly berating PETA. 

Last night, distinguished guest speakers Professor Colin Blakemore and British psychologist Dr Richard Ryder spoke at a One World Forum debate about animal research at Warwick University. The debate was markedly superior to most because Dr Ryder does not accept the simplistic antivivisection notion that all animal research is fundamentally flawed, although he believes the benefits are exaggerated. This allowed room to develop common ground, at least in the belief that we should show compassion to sentient creatures, be they human or animal.

A significant part of the debate was centred on the concept of ‘speciesism’, a term which was coined by Richard Ryder in 1973 to denote a prejudice based on what he considered morally irrelevant physical differences between humans and other animals.

The case that speciesism is irrational and unacceptable has been extensively promoted by animal-rights philosophers, and is discussed for example in Wikipedia.

But it seems the case for treating animals differently from humans has not had the same depth of philosophical commitment, and is somewhat disjointed. Here then is a summary of the main arguments for treating humans morally differently to animals.