National Antivisection Society
St Mary's Hospital Medical School, London
NAVS undercover investigation - 1992
Tamarin Monkeys
Tamarin monkeys were injected with faeces from one another in hepatitis experiments. Despite inflicting this painful and debilitating disease on these unfortunate animals, the experimenters still could not say at the end whether the hepatitis strain they were using was a human or monkey virus. This could have been studied in human tissue culture.
Several provisions of the Government’s Code of Practice on care of primates were ignored: tamarins naturally live in extended family groups, spending their days grooming, travelling, foraging. The Code of Practice states that primates need stimulating environments; adequate space, complexity of environment; social interaction, amongst other recommendations.
In St. Mary’s they were kept isolated in tiny, bare metal cages with nothing to do, and solid metal walls separated their cages. Following the NAVS’ investigation, the Home Office promised that the facilities would be improved. The laboratory was not penalised in any way.
Rats
Rats had tubes and screws fixed directly into the brain; tetanus toxin was injected into their brains to induce seizures in an attempt to mimic epilepsy. The animal’s torment can barely be imagined; we filmed one of them constantly clutching at the electrode in his head, closing his eyes, clearly in distress.
Yet rats make a poor model for epilepsy, and the drugs being studies are known to cause different reactions in rats and primates.
For rodents, life was like a factory farm. A breeding mouse would give birth to six litters in six months, and then be killed. In just 34 weeks, our investigator estimates that he saw almost 2,500 animals being killed, or taken away to be killed, just because they were surplus to requirements. Most were suffocated to death with CO2, others had their necks broken. Babies had their heads cut off with scissors; their little heads and bodies simply dropped into a plastic bag, twitching and their mouths gasping.
One of the major problems of this laboratory appeared to be lack of staff and money to properly care for the animals. This raises a very important point which should be addressed: if laboratories cannot afford to look after their animals properly, why are they being allowed to keep them?
Groundhogs - wild woodchucks
Wild woodchucks (groundhogs) were trapped in the USA and sold to St Mary’s. Small metal cages with shredded paper bedding were their lot whilst being used in hepatitis experiments, where they were almost guaranteed to develop painful liver cancers.
But their suffering was in vain. The experiment involved a different virus to the human strain and it is already effectively possible to vaccinate against the virus in question.
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