Penaran Higgs from the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection explains why she is against testing on animals

Anyone reading recent coverage of the pro-vivisection demonstration in Oxford would imagine that the issue of animal testing rages between scientists and animal rights activists who are all in favour of violence!
Yet the fact is many people are uncomfortable with the idea of animal testing but at the same time don’t agree with the violence that a very few animal rights protestors use to get their message across. In fact a recent poll by pro-vivisection organisation, the RDS, showed a pretty even split across the whole of the UK population between those who oppose animal testing for medical reasons and those who support it.
So it’s important that people realise there is a ‘third way’, which opposes all violence - whether inside the laboratories or otherwise.
The BUAV (British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection) campaigns peacefully to end experiments on animals. We lobby the government to alter legislation and use the judicial system to expose the failings of the law.
We also produce expert scientific reports demonstrating the flaws in animal testing written with the input of Dr Gill Langley MA PhD MIBiol CBiol, whose doctorate is in neurochemistry and who worked as a research fellow at Nottingham University studying neurophysiology. She works as scientific consultant to the BUAV and other animal protection organisations in Europe as well as internationally. She is representative of a growing number of scientists who are now realising that for benefit of human health it would be faster, more efficient and more humane if more money were allocated into employing alternatives to testing on animals in the development of medicines.
Because of interspecies as well as intraspecies differences, animals don’t make reliable subjects for the study of human diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease. Animal testing for medical research is unreliable, potentially dangerous to humans and can delay medical progress. This can mean that drugs are released as safe, which may in fact cause serious side effects in humans - Vioxx being just one recent high profile example. Testing on animals may also mean that drugs having adverse reactions in other animals but not humans, are prevented from being developed. For these reasons, and others, there is growing concern about the use of animals for experimentation. Animal experiments are actually an obstacle to the development of more scientific and reliable methods which could really help to save lives.
Most of the ‘breakthroughs’ in medical research one hears about in the media that have been developed through animal tests never actually succeed in helping to develop new cures.
Take the case of research into strokes for example: treatments have been developed many times over to treat this condition in mice and numerous other animals, however no treatment has been found that works for humans, either due to side effects, or due to the drug simply being ineffective.
For decades experimental allergic encephalitis (EAE) mice have been used as a model in multiple sclerosis research due to the fact that there are superficial similarities between the two conditions.
This meant the differences between EAE and multiple sclerosis were not fully understood. Today many scientists are saying that progress in developing a cure for multiple sclerosis has been delayed as a direct result of reliance on EAE models.
Much of the work on Parkinson’s Disease in this country uses monkeys in an attempt to create a ‘model’ of Parkinson’s.
However, the brain lesions inflicted on them result in only a superficial resemblance to human Parkinson’s Disease. They are not representative of the progression of the disease or the damage seen in humans.
And whilst it may be true to say that research on animals may have contributed to some discoveries that have been useful for human health - if you throw enough mud some of it will stick - this does not mean that animal research was the most efficient, productive or safe method to have been used or indeed the right way forward today.
In fact less than 25% of animal experiments are for medical research. Most animal testing is toxicity studies (poisoning studies).
Furthermore the same animal tests may be done over and over by different researchers since journals only publish successes rather than failures, so many different researchers may try the same method, meaning that many more animals suffer. And suffer they do. Although it is often argued that we have the strictest laws in the world to protect laboratory animals, the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 (the UK legislation governing animal experiments) was not devised in order to protect laboratory animals. It was devised to protect animal researchers by allowing them to subject animals in laboratories to the sort of treatment that animals outside the laboratory are legally protected from.
Under UK legislation it is still perfectly legal for an animal in a laboratory to be unnaturally caged for its entire life; poisoned; deprived of food, water or sleep; applied with skin and eye irritants; subjected to psychological stress; deliberately infected with disease; brain damaged; paralysed; surgically mutilated; irradiated; burned; gassed; force fed; electrocuted and killed.
In addition to this, each and every time we go undercover in laboratories we find breaches of the law. During one investigation into the primate facility in 2001, the BUAV discovered monkeys, who had just had the top of their skulls sawn off and a stroke induced, left unattended for up to 15 hours. Some monkeys were found dead in the morning and others were in a poor condition.
However, when challenged, ministers denied there was anything irregular. A Judicial Review against the Home Secretary is pending.
This is the type of suffering that is kept top secret because most of the general public would be appalled at the cruelty inflicted on animals - many exactly the same as their pets at home - in the name of science.
We want animal testing to become more transparent so people can see what their government is funding. We too want open reasoned debate between researchers who use animals and the increasing numbers of scientists who consider animal experiments as flawed science.
But the fact is the animal research community, aided by the government, does everything to stifle debate on animal testing by opposing the release of meaningful information about what is done to animals in laboratories and why it is done to them.
The Home Office fiercely resists applications from responsible organisations such as ourselves for anonymised information under the Freedom of Information Act. They will only publish very brief summaries of licences written by the researchers themselves, concealing more than they reveal and downplaying the suffering involved.
Examples of modern cutting edge techniques - the sort that we would like to see more funding in order to develop so as to avoid flawed methodology - that save the lives of humans and animals include ‘human micro-dosing’, a method that can test ‘whole body’ effects of drugs in humans by-passing the use of animals.
Also the microfluidic circuit, a ‘chip’ containing areas of cells representing different parts of the human body linked by tiny channels that circulate nutrients between them. It is designed to assess the effects of a potential new drug compound in humans and gives human-specific data in contrast to misleading and dangerous animal data that cannot be extrapolated to humans. These are just two examples but there are many others.
Researchers using animals need to stop trying to justify the suffering they inflict on millions of animals, stop delaying medical progress, and switch to more modern methods, such as cell and tissue culture, artificial organ systems, QSARs, computer modelling and non-invasive human brain imaging that offer more accurate, reliable and repeatable data.

Information about our work can be found at www.buav.org