The most vitriolic antivivisection group in the UK, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) has spun out of control in its account of the single point it won in the court case against the Home Office this July. The Home Office has appealed against the ruling.

In its latest mailing to supporters, the BUAV claims that the government was ‘found guilty of turning a blind eye to the substantial suffering of animals’. No such verdict was made by the judge in the full court transcript. He never claimed that the suffering of animals was not taken into account, but rather that the severity limits for certain experiments were incorrectly assigned when project licences held at Cambridge University were renewed in 2003 (he said they should have been ‘substantial’ rather than ‘moderate’). The Home Office remains clear in their original assessment of this case that changing the severity limit would not itself alter the experience of an animal undergoing regulated procedures.

Despite the rhetoric from the BUAV, the judge said precious little on the wider implications of his ruling, apart from comments on information provision. Here he stated that:

‘…the welfare of animals subjected to experimental procedures is of no little interest to the public at large. It is of importance that the limited information which is made public is accurate. It is also important that Parliament is accurately informed’.

The judge also commented that a reasonably well-informed member of the public or of Parliament should be able to readily understand the general thrust of the categories of severity limits and bands. In fact only the number of project licences granted in each severity band are published every year in the Home Office annual statistics. The severity limits of individual protocols are not routinely published and cannot therefore be said to form a central part of the public debate.

The BUAV claims that the court verdict should mean that ‘many licences for animal testing are not granted’. There does not seem to be any basis for this assertion. The Home Office consider that ‘judgements of animal welfare costs, the level of suffering that may be produced, and the humane endpoints to be applied are determined by the detailed narrative descriptions on the form of application and licence, not by the shorthand severity limits assigned to the protocols or the severity band assigned to the licence’. In other words, the Home Office assesses any potential suffering to the animal on the basis of what is actually expected to happen to the animal. This is obviously sensible.

Home Office licensing of animal experiments is all about judgement. In matters of judgement, there will inevitably be disagreement sometimes. In this case, the judge did not agree with the views of the experts. Fair enough. If that is his view, it must stand unless the Home Office appeal is successful. But it is virtually impossible from such a small and highly selective sample to draw any wider conclusions relevant to animal experiments in general.

The use of monkeys accounts for only a tiny fraction of all scientific procedures involving animals – about 0.14%. Since regulatory toxicology accounts for two thirds of primate use, research purposes are only one third. Whilst neuroscience is an important area for the use of monkeys, brain surgery on monkeys is only one type of procedure – exceptionally rare overall. In this case, the judge selected for consideration only one project licence out of three issued to Cambridge University. For his judgement he referred only to three of the seven protocols in that one project licence. We are therefore talking about an extraordinarily high degree of scrutiny of an extraordinarily small number of experiments.

The fact that the judge did not uphold the three other points made before him by the BUAV, (and gave no leave to appeal), is not surprisingly something that BUAV chooses to ignore!