National Antivisection Society
Repetition of experiments when the outcome is known
Animals are used in experiments when the outcome is already known, when products have already been tested on animals, or are already in widespread human use.
Beagle puppies at Toxicol/Quintiles, a commercial contract testing lab, were force-fed a weedkiller which had already been tested on animals, and had been on the market for twenty years.
At the same lab, a NAVS Field Officer discovered that the active ingredient of an anti-malarial drug was being tested on dogs. The drug had already been given to over a million patients with “remarkably few adverse effects".
We filmed sheep being used as part of an ongoing series of projects at Oxford University, studying a pump designed to assist the heart after injury. The researcher responsible for the pump had already conducted similar experiments in the USA, and similar pumps are already used by patients. Over 50 sheep were used; some had open and infected wounds, others broke plates in their heads, headbutting the walls. The researchers described some of this suffering as a “learning curve".
In one of the most horrible experiments filmed by a NAVS Field Officer, rats at St Bart’s were given arthritis. The animals dragged their swollen, painful legs around their tiny cage. Even the Home Office acknowledged that this experiment had caused “substantial pain". Yet the drug being tested was already in human use.
Cats, at the Institute of Neurology, were used as part of a migraine experiment, examining a theory which had been discredited in humans ten years earlier, after a thirty year clinical study involving a thousand patients.
It is not mere accident that this work is allowed to continue unquestioned. The law as it stands ensures secrecy, and blocks scientific debate.
