Reducing and Eliminating Animal Experiments

Last July, Uncaged submitted the largest-ever animal protection petition to the UK Government, 1.5 million signatures calling on the Government to end animal experimentation. We are campaigning for the Government to adopt the elimination of animal experiments as a high-level policy objective, and pursue this aim by developing a “road map” to realise the vision of cruelty-free science. This is also consistent with the overarching aim of the draft replacement EU Directive on animal experiments.

Ethical problems in animal research: animal pain and suffering

In 2003, Uncaged won a historic legal battle against the drug company Novartis which allowed us to publish redacted leaked documents describing pig-to-primate organ transplant experiments that took place in Cambridgeshire between 1994 and 2000. (1) This was the fate of just one of the wild-caught baboons sacrificed in this research programme, as revealed by these unprecedented documents:

He was given the ID number ‘W205m’ and chosen to be one of six baboons to have a genetically-engineered pig heart transplanted into his neck. He was repeatedly injected and force-fed with an extremely toxic cocktail of drugs in a vain attempt to prevent his immune system from rejecting the pig heart.

He spent the last few days of his life in a wretched state in a small stainless steel cage:

• On day 4: His neck is swollen and the drugs are making him ill, there is vomit on the floor of the cage. His condition deteriorates further.
• On day 11: He’s very sick, but despite his pain and fear he is quiet and huddled in a corner of the steel cage. His neck is badly swollen and the transplanted heart is enlarged.
• On day 12: He is unsteady and the transplanted heart is red and swollen and seeping yellow fluid. He is reluctant to move at all and, in the words of the researchers, is showing ‘obvious discomfort’. His jaw has also swollen.
• On day 21: Baboon W205m is finally put out of his misery.

The suffering of this animal unequivocally breached the ‘moderate’ pain limit on this experiment, yet the Government has refused to take any action in this case.

Scientific problems in animal research: are the results relevant and reliable?

The NHS has funded a major study into the relevance of animal tests (2) which reveals that:

• animal researchers don’t tell doctors about their results
• clinical trials with human patients start before the animal research is completed
• drugs that fail in animals are used in humans anyway
• a drug that increased overall mortality in animals was, nonetheless, used in people
• most of the animal research that was analysed was poorly conducted and gave conflicting results

This indicates that animal tests are something of a formality - a box-ticking exercise - with the results being ignored or manipulated to suit the interests of drug companies.

Professor Steve Brown of the Government’s Medical Research Council acknowledged that, despite the suffering of millions of animals in cancer and AIDS research, most treatments had not worked in humans because the artificial diseases inflicted on animals are not the same as the illnesses we contract.

Scientific reports show that animal tests for diseases like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are futile for the same reason. Dr Kieran Breen, director of Research & Development at the Parkinson’s Disease Society says they need human brains to be donated “Because only humans get Parkinson’s, we can’t use animals for research.”

Pharmaceutical drugs - which all go through lots of animal tests - are now the fourth biggest killer of people in the UK after heart disease, stroke and cancer. For example, ‘Vioxx’ was a painkiller that, in line with standard practice, was tested in at least two animal species before entering human trials. The experiments on animals indicated that the drug was safe and even beneficial to the heart. But when humans then took the drug it caused an estimated 140,000 heart attacks and strokes, and was taken off the market.

The infamous TGN1412 drug had been tested in both rats and monkeys. A catastrophic chain reaction occurred in the human volunteers at Northwick Park hospital turning them into swollen ‘elephant’ men with loss of their fingertips and toes. Yet it was perfectly safe in monkeys even though they received doses 500 times larger than the human victims.

In simple terms, experiments on animals do not predict what will happen to us. It is estimated that a staggering 92% of drugs that appear safe and effective in animals turn out to be useless and/or dangerous for human use.

Policy solutions

There is broad agreement that the infliction of pain on animals raises serious ethical concerns and that there are significant scientific limitations to the use of animal models as a guide to human biology. So, we are asking candidates and the future Government to start taking the need for reform seriously and work with the rest of the EU to develop a road map to the elimination of animal experiments.

The new approach we are proposing represents the consensus position in society. This is reflected in the Animal Procedures Committee’s criticism of the Government’s rejection of targets for replacing animal experiments:

‘It is commonly - and we believe, properly - said that the use of animals in scientific experimentation is a regrettable necessity. It follows that there should be a determination to work imaginatively and constructively to bring about the end of animal use. Our interest in exploring with stakeholders the case for targets for an end to certain uses of animals arose from this perspective. We noted that in relation to the obviously quite different area of environmental pollution, it had been the case that demanding targets have been identified as providing a goal even where these targets might require technological and other innovation if they were to be met. There is a case to be explored for an analogous strategy in relation to animal use.’ (3)

Similarly, the prestigious Nuffield Council on BioEthics has established the basic ethical premise that inflicting pain and suffering on animals, at the very least, poses serious ethical costs, and that a world where animals were not subjected to pain and harm in the course of research must be the ultimate goal. (4)

Unfortunately, genuine acceptance by the Government of the idea that ‘animal suffering cannot be viewed as a matter of moral indifference… a view with which we consider few could reasonably disagree in a civilised society’, (5) would require a radical change in the Government’s established policy of blanket support for the animal research industry. The Home Office has a mindset that there is nothing they can do to affect animal experiments, contrary to official claims of strict regulation and the role of public opinion, ethics and political thinking in this policy area. In reality, as the Government admits, animal experimentation is ‘demand-led’.

However, in a democratic society it is the right of citizens to place ethical restrictions on scientists to help stimulate the development of advanced non-animal research methods. The huge scale of the petition is testament to the British public’s deep concern regarding the intrinsic cruelty and scientific weaknesses of animal experimentation (6) - and their desire to see a positive, pro-active approach to making animal testing history.

Do you support a strategy to identify and implement targets for the reduction and elimination of animal experimentation?
YES / NO

REFERENCES:

1. www.xenodiaries.org
2. Perel, P. et al. (2006) ‘Comparison of treatment effects between animal experiments and clinical trials: systematic review’. British Medical Journal. (accessed online 6 May 2009: BMJ, doi:10.1136/bmj.39048.407928.BE (published 15 December 2006)
3. Report of the Animal Procedures Committee, 2005: 49 (www.apc.gov.uk/reference/apc_ann_rep_2005.pdf)
4. Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2005). The ethics of research involving animals: xix. (available from www.nuffieldbioethics.org)
5. Letter from Caroline Flint MP, Minister of State, Home Office, 28 March 2005, to the Animal Procedures Committee. In Report of the Animal Procedures Committee, 2005: 42 (www.apc.gov.uk/reference/apc_ann_rep_2005.pdf)
6. As acknowledged by the oldest group representing animal researchers, the British Physiological Society in its submission to the European Commission expert consultation exercise, ‘one cannot “ensure animal welfare” in experimental studies’, because experiments on animals inevitably cause some degree of pain, suffering and/or distress.

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