Animal Experimentation

One of the tests that has recently come out for reducing animals in testing. It is used to test the oral toxicity of animals. In this procedure, the number of rats used is reduced. This is a test that can be used in place of the LD50 test.

As oppossed to the LD50 test, which gives doses to a bunch of animals all at the same time, the up and down gives doses to one animal at a time. If the animal dies, the dose for the next animal is decreased. however, if they do not die, the dose is increased. This greatly reduces the number of animals used because it sees the results of the first test animal and then goes off of that. In the LD50 test, the testers will go off of results from a whole batch of animals that were tested and killed. The next time they want to do another test, they use a whole other batch of animals instead of just one, like the up and down.

"The procedure has been tested, by simulation, on 10 of the survey studies. It produced excellent agreement with the original studies. The 95% confidence interval for the LD50 averaged ±32% by the up-and-down method, compared with ±15% for conventional studies using 40 to 50 animals”. For those of you who do not speak statistics, basically this means that this test produced just as accurate results as other tests and still used less animals.

THE FACT!!

Around 3,000 monkeys are still used for scientific trials – mainly for research into human diseases such as Parkinson's, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, HIV and strokes – every year in the UK because of similarities in brain physiology.

Last year, more than 800 monkeys died in laboratory experiments in Scottish research centres.

Around Europe, 10,000 primates are used in experiments every year but some members of the European Parliament are pressing for a ban.

One supporter of a ban is Scottish MEP David Martin, who called for the development of alternatives.

"It is the failure to develop and validate modern non-animal tests that perpetuates the reliance on out-dated animal experimentation, and when these procedures are carried out on our closest animal relatives, people are rightly appalled," he said.

A spokesman for the campaign group Advocates for Animals said: "There is huge political and public support for a European ban on the use of great apes and Dr Ferdowsian's research makes an already strong case unanswerable."

Animal Testing

An estimated additional 8 million animals are bred and then destroyed as surplus to requirements. As well as mice, rats, hamsters, gerbils and guinea pigs (the bulk of experiments involve rodents), other animals such as rabbits, dogs, cats, monkeys, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and even insects are used - in fact there's hardly a species that are not experimented on.

Many different kinds of experiments take place - painful and lethal diseases are inflicted on animals; animals are isolated, starved, burned, blinded, poisoned, irradiated and they are still used to test a wide range of substances from food additives to cleaning products. All of the animals used in experiments are killed. After years of gradual decline recent statistics (from 2002 onwards) have shown a steady increase in the number of animal experiments taking place and the advent of genetic engineering threatens to continue this upward trend.

Our opposition to animal experiments is both ethical and scientific. Ethically speaking, to deliberately torture and take the life of another sentient creature, be they human or nonhuman, is an abuse of power. As a society we already recognise this and legal action can be taken against people who mistreat companion animals. Yet we don't extend this level of protection to animals in laboratories.

Scientifically speaking, experimentation on animals is a fundamentally flawed approach to learning about human biology and disease. Differences between the infinitely complex biological systems of different species of animals mean that data gained from experiments on nonhumans are an unreliable and dangerous guide to the human condition.

Experiments on animals persist because of entrenched prejudices, both ethical and scientific.