In Our Time - Animal Experiments and Rights

Episode Date: March 18, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of animals in humankind's search for knowledge. Since the Greek physician Galen used pigs for anatomical studies in the 2nd century, animals have been used by scientists to further human knowledge. Yet few, if any subjects in this country, raise such violent feelings and passions as animals and their place in our society. With the growing politicisation of animal rights, it is a subject which is increasing in intensity. Do animals have rights and do our needs permit us to use them still to enhance our own lives in the twentieth century? Is it still necessary to experiment on animals for the good of humankind? Or is that morally unacceptable and barbaric - particularly in the light of new research into animal consciousness?With Colin Blakemore, Professor of Physiology, Oxford University, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Royal Society and targeted in the 1980s by animal welfare activists protesting at his research methods; Dr Lynda Birke, biologist, teacher at Lancaster and Warwick Universities, and previously worked for 7 years in animal behaviour at the Open University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, today we look at one of the most impassioned debates of the late 20th century in this country, animal rights, and the use of animals in furthering scientific understanding. What's the place of animals in our quest to increase human knowledge?

Is it still necessary to experiment on animals for the good of humankind? or is that morally unacceptable and barbaric, particularly in the light of new research into animal consciousness? Colin Blakemore is Professor of Physiology at Oxford University and no stranger to controversy, as they say. In the 1990s, at the height of the BSE crisis, he spoke out saying eating beef was just not worth the risk. In the 1980s, he was a target for animal welfare activists

who were protesting at his research methods. He was made President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1997. Dr Linda Burke is a biologist with a special interest in the social and political aspects of science currently teaching at Lancaster and Warwick Universities previously she worked for seven years in animal behaviour alongside the neuroscientist Professor Stephen Rose at the Open University In one of her book she wrote

Potential benefits to humans and indeed usually only to specific subgroups of humans must not be used to justify subjecting people or other organisms to experimental situations we would not accept for ourselves or our loved ones. Colin Blakemore, in a recent newspaper interview, you said, I hate working with animals, I think it's wrong and I think it's evil, but I think for now it's a utilitarian equation.

It's necessary, and a scientist must have honesty and integrity and be accountable. What do you mean by saying that animal experiments are utilitarian? One has to see our use of animals, not just for medical research, but all the ways that we use them, as part of a balance of cost and benefit. To take an animal life is, as I said, I would stick by it wrong. The world would be a better place if we didn't have to take advantage of animals in any manner. But I guess anybody who makes use of animals to eat them or to wear them or to... train them for circuses or to use them for advertising or to do medical research would make an argument that there is some benefit from doing so.

And I think that in each case, in each of those cases is a different moral case, we just have to judge the validity of that utilitarian equation. One strong area is the use of animals for research, and let's talk about the use of animals for research into curing, helping to cure diseases that human beings have. Can you give us some idea of what has happened in that area? This has to be the starting point, at least one of the starting points for the discussion about medical research,

because of the level of misunderstanding, misperception. A survey of school kids, 14 to 15-year-olds a few years ago, showed that 90% of them thought that no advance in medicine, no advance in medicine had ever depended on the use of animals. I mean, that reflects two things, the effectiveness, I think, of some of the propaganda against animal use and the ineffectiveness of our side of this argument, and by our I mean the medical community and research community.

So could you tell us, just reel off a few of the things that you think. Well, I think very difficult to think of any medical treatment that has not, at some point in its development, needed animal use. We're still seeking examples, Colin. All right, penicillin, antibiotics, hormone treatments, insulin, vaccinations, all forms of vaccine polio diphtheria, who've been cough and so on, treatments for asthma, for ulcers, blood transfusion, every form of surgery, cardiac surgery, bypass surgery, hip replacement, treatments for heart disease, tuberculosis,

any area of medical practice whatsoever, and not just for humans, by the way, for animals too, of course. All forms of veterinary treatment have depended for their development on the use of animals. Now that's an immensely long list, and you're saying in every case, includes treatments for animals, You're saying in every case, animals have been helpful. Are you also saying animals have been necessary? In the context in which the work was done absolutely necessary, I mean, one always has to be questioning and probing and testing whether there are ways to gain the same knowledge without the use of animals.

One of the arguments which I think I do listen to as being more convincing that many is that there is a sort of complacency in medical research, that what has worked in the past and which, what, can certainly work in the future, is just used because it's there. And I think that not enough medical scientists do pay constant attention to the need to think about alternative approaches. Before I turn to Linda, because as I say, I'm just going to lay the platform, there'll be plenty of time for both you to come in. A final fact, or it might be a factored, it might be a false fact. You'll tell me, when I was researching this, the discovery of penicillin depended on eight mice, four of which died, but so far we know at least 30 million people have been.

That's right. I mean the crucial work was down in Oxford as it happens in the 1940s with enormous problems with septicemia and infection amongst troops in the Second World War. That's what stimulated the effort. But yes, the standard test, and still used, by the way, the eight mice infected with streptococcus, four of them treated with penicillin. Those four didn't die, the other four did. And within a very short period of time, penicillin was in use on the wards and the Radcliffe Infirmary, having now saved, well, countless tens of millions of lives, humans and animals. Right. Linda Burke, in the light of that,

do you think that you would say that experiment with animals cannot be justified, to alleviate human suffering or to advance human health and life expectancy, and need pain, that sort of thing? Obviously, in the light of that, it would be very hard to refute that, because clearly there are some benefits which have had the use of animals in their history, let's put it that way. I slightly hesitate about the use of the word depended upon because Colin recognised that there may well have been other methods

that might, had we had a different history to science, might have evolved. What other methods would they have been? Well, that's because we have only this one history of science that we've had. It's difficult to say what they could be. But for instance, with the use of the eight mice experiment for penicillin, would you have used eight human beings, or what would you have done? I don't know what I'd have done. I don't know what I'd have done.

I think the problem is one of... of the methods of science are profoundly reductionist, and I think this is probably a point on which I suspect Colin and I would agree. My moral position is simply that I really find it immoral to inflict suffering on animals under any circumstances. Colin is quite right to point to the fact that in our culture we use animals in a whole lot of different ways. We can then have the debate about the extent to which animals suffer in any of those uses.

I don't think that we would dispute between us that there is the potential for suffering in a number of uses of animals in science. And one of the changes that has been happening, certainly in recent years, which I think is a good one, is that there is now far more attention paid to ways in which the suffering might be reduced. To take up Colin's point about complacency, however,

it is still a problem amongst a scientific community. For example, one of the things that very often gets said is the number of animals that are actually anaesthetised during a particular procedure. It is still not widespread practice to discuss post-operative analgesia. Animals once operated on might be returned to an animal house where the technicians will take care of them, but any means of reducing or alleviating subsequent pain

are not widely discussed. I think in Britain now that is changing. But how do you compare? the suffering of animals, which undoubtedly goes on, in experiments, with the suffering of, oh, I don't know, battery chickens and turkeys stuffed up for Christmas and, I know, poultry fed up to eat, salmon confined in tanks in locks so that we could eat. I mean, how do you compare that, the stuff we eat and the experiments?

Would you stop all that happening, too? I want to see a society in which we try to prevent all kinds of suffering to animals and I think that. Well, we're all on that side, but I mean it's just a practical question. Would you actually say that as well as banning the use of animals for laboratory, we ban the use of animals for the sort of food that a lot of people listening to this program eat? I suppose there's a part of me that's sympathetic to that claim. I think we're all sympathetic, but do you think we should do it?

You keep pushing me to say yes or no, and I don't want to. That's fair enough. Colin Blakemore, well, both of you really, how do you think this obviously is a real concern, it's a growing concern, it's a current concern that serious people have. How is science currently taking aboard this concern? First of all, Colin Blakemore, then Linda. I think there are two ways in which scientists show their concern.

One is to have it forced on them, because the nature of the law is very clear. You cannot use animals. It's illegal to use an animal for an experiment if there is any alternative. I mean, you have to demonstrate that there's no alternative way to solve the problem. Secondly, you have to play very specific attention to the potential for suffering and to document in detail what that possibility is and the issuing of project licences for particular experiments and every experiment has to have its own license

which describes in detail all the procedures, the anaesthetics, the post-operative care and everything, that has to document why you've chosen a particular species, why a lower species, as it were, is not adequate, why the numbers have been selected, why they couldn't be lower, or in some cases why they shouldn't be higher to support the statistics.

And what's being done to a little bit. any possibility of suffering, and all of that goes into some huge moral calculation that's supposed to be exercised by the Home Office. Now, you know, you might express doubts about whether that's possible, but that's the nature of the law. The second concern is that, you know, scientists are people too. One of the biggest problems we have is to fight against the image of scientists as inherently evil, misguided, white-coated, lunatics who walk into the laboratory each morning and say,

what dreadful thing can we do to an animal today that we might get away with? You know, scientists are responsible people. There's a lot of debate amongst biologists at the moment about how techniques can be refined. Well, I mean, let me put it specifically. Where have the alternatives to animal use that we all pray for come from? They've come, of course, from scientists themselves, mainly from scientists who have previously been involved directly in work on whole animals.

I'd like to take a word you used two or three times in that answer, which was the word lower, and talk to Linda about the hierarchies. which are involved in all this, as it were, in the hierarchical sense, starting with us and going down to them, them, them, and a diminution. Can you just discuss why I object to that? A few years ago, I read an article in a book about animal intelligence, which said every animal is the smartest. It then went on to argue that every animal is smart, intelligent,

within its particular ecological niche. Now, obviously, I'm not going to try and claim great intellectual feats for nematode worms, partly because I'm not sure that I would even know how to ask the question of a nematode worm. But one of the problems with the categorization of higher and lower animals, while it has some usefulness, of course, is that it does rather obscure differences between animals which are not quantitative and linear. They're qualitative. I don't actually know how we can understand the world of many other mammals,

which are very olfactory, for instance. and so if you're asking questions about intelligence or consciousness of particular species, quite often I think we just go in completely the wrong direction because we don't understand enough about what it means to be that particular animal in the wild or even in the laboratory. Well, we know certain things. I mean, we know, for example, that animals feel pain. We can see that, and some animals feel extreme pain,

in extreme situations very like humans. Now, is that a factor in your position that you take about experiments of animals? Oh, I do think that we do know that animals feel pain. The mechanisms of pain reception physiologically seem to be quite widespread across the animal kingdom, certainly chemically. But then we come to sort of knowledge of self and consciousness. I remember David Attenborough saying in an interview that he didn't know whether a fox, for instance, would know, or, as it were, mind whether it was killed in being in an extreme situation in the wild or in an extreme semi-artificial situation being hunted down by a pack of hands at the time of

and so we're coming into the area of consciousness I do take it I'd like to know first as as one measure of animals claim to full rights in this as being whether or not they have consciousness is that part of the argument you're proposing the concept of rights is quite problematic. As a feminist, I certainly don't believe that in this country or elsewhere in the world women have rights within that United Nations kind of sense.

So extrapolating rights to other animals is tricky. There are ways in which it can be useful. I was reminded of in reading an article recently by Baruti Galdecas, who's done all the work on orangutans. And she was pointing out that, she did use the word rights,

talking about the concept of orangutan's needing or having a right to living in the forest and arguing that actually that then also affects the human communities who live in that part of the world. Both of the animals concerned the apes and the human communities being affected by multinational companies and their logging performance and so on. So there's a loss of rights that actually locates the animals very, very, closely to the humans. And I think maybe in that sense there might be some use to using the word

rights. It's a kind of heuristic one. Is there a cut-off point? Because we know that those, you know, there's our pets. We know dogs are very intelligent and horses we know are very intelligent. And people credit them with all sorts of things, including consciousness. But how far and orangutans and the chimpanzees and the

near relation they have, that strange, less than 2% distance away from us genetically, and so on. But is there a cut-off point? And if there's a cut-off point, where does that leave your argument? I mean, when we're talking about mice, when we're talking about, we're going further and further, if I can use the word, down the chain or along the chain. Do you think there is a cut-off point?

Are we still talking about worms? Are we still talking the same thing about worms have rights? I think you have to face up to this philosophically. I mean, you tell me. Yes, you do have to face up to it philosophically. And some people who argue for animal rights philosophically have tried to draw lines. I think it's extraordinarily difficult. And you might, for example, have a debate

about where you would draw the line with respect to mechanisms of pain perception. You might draw the line in terms of known responses in terms of behavioural suffering. You might draw that line somewhere else. That's part of the difficulty. To draw the line absolutely is really quite difficult. Of course, the British law does specify

that vertebrates have to be under, they're the ones that are brought under. under the law and you can only use them, vertebrates under particular conditions. The law does not extend to, say, using a fruit fly. Colin Blayber, what's your view of this? Well, I share Linda's concern about this notion of rights, and I'm glad to see her acknowledge that. Going down that road of simply asking what has rights

and where do we come up against a kind of absolute barrier beyond which some species don't have rights is sort of vacuous. it doesn't get us anywhere. I mean, Peter Singer, in Animal Liberation, considered this question and ended up with not a very biological view that the boundary lay somewhere between, wasn't it rats and flounders, which seems a very odd place to put it. I mean, we're bound to make those kinds of judgments on multiple criteria, familiarity being the most obvious one. I mean, we all are inclined to think that dogs and cats and horses are bound to have feelings and be conscious, but be a bit more suspicious about alligators and, I don't know, elephants, because we were less aware of them.

And that's bad. That's bad biology. It's certainly bad philosophy. I mean, Linda mentioned that the law in Britain draws a line at vertebra. Interestingly, octopus has just been included recently within the law, and I think that's absolutely right. And the reason for that was increasing knowledge of the sophistication of the behaviour of octopus with a very big nervous system. So I think we have to, I mean, the starting point for this discussion should be that we should minimize suffering in the world. I mean, that's got to be the case, whether it's a fruit fly or a gorilla,

and judge each species, as it were, on its merits. And again, ask, why should you want to interfere with this species at all in considering whether it could possibly be justified? Yes, but what I'd like to know from Linda is, at what stage in any animal would you say this animal cannot be used? What does the animal have to have for you to say, We can't use that animal for experiment. It might use another one, or it might use a different sort of thing.

What is the animal to have for you to say this is not acceptable? Characteristics. No, what is it? Is it that it feels pain? Is it that you think it's good consciousness? Is it that... What are you looking for? I think it's a combination of pain and consciousness.

And how do you judge these things? That's what I'd like to know. The criteria have to be to do with pain and consciousness. The problem is that having said that those are the criteria, it's not always easy to recognise exactly how to apply those. But then we come back to this question raised earlier, which is if you apply these to experiment, don't you apply it also to the fish we catch and eat,

the chickens, battery chickens, the turkeys? So the whole thing, therefore, is, in your view, to be questioned and the whole thing could therefore be, as it were, outlawed in that sense. I think that I have grave concerns about anything that causes animal suffering, and that isn't just applied to the use of animals in physiological experiments or whatever. What I would like to raise, though, is the question of the ways in which scientists are brought up in general, and I do think that certainly in my lifetime, there was a very strong tendency to repress any questioning of the use of animals.

I was told very firmly not to show any signs of emotion when I got upset about having to dissect a rabbit at 17 as part of an A-level class. And I think that that's still there, although perhaps it's beginning to change. And it was interesting that when a colleague and I were doing a sociological study of how scientists themselves perceive animal experimentation

in the wake of the change in legislation that came in 1986, Quite a few referred to the ways in which the change in legislation had created a changing climate, if you like, so that they are now beginning to think about it more. It's also true that some said that nothing at all has changed since the Act. Colin Blackmore. One, I think, very good feature of the law is that the animals involved actually have their spokespeople

who speak and act on their behalf. There have to be veterinarians in every establishment. Technicians increasingly are taught to be the representatives, the advocates for animals. There has to be a so-called day-to-day care person who essentially has to take the role of taking the animal's position and defending them in interactions with them with scientists. And I think scientists do and certainly should feel less in total control,

autonomous control, of the way that experiments are organized, are more part of a dialogue with technicians, vets and others, and even, as it were, tacitly the animals themselves about whether what is being done is worthwhile. Can I wield rather a blunt instrument at this stage, if you don't mind, you just ask two questions. One is, do you seriously, as a scientist and see any possibility of getting the results that have come from animals over the past, let's say, 30 or 40 years,

through any other method, A, and B, do you consider that if we become more and more strictly in this country this is going to stop or it's just going to happen in many other countries and that's all there is to it. So could you answer both those questions? Yes, well taking the latter point first, I think that's a real risk. And be not as well controlled.

By exercising our own, as it were, philosophical luxury being able to make those kinds of choices, we may simply raise the level of suffering elsewhere when the work is done, you know, in the third world or whatever. Chances of reducing animal use, well, look at the facts. Animal use is reduced by a factor of three since the 1970s and the trend until very recently has been absolutely consistently linearly downwards. There is a problem we have to deal with, I think, in that respect,

and that is the development of transgenesis, transgenic animals, animals whose genetics have been deliberately interfered with. That's causing a blip in the figures because that technique is so amazingly powerful. in providing medical researchers with much more compelling and convincing models of human disease than they have ever had before. On the other hand, I think there's a dilemma here, because if you muck around with the genes of animals, you also create the potential for even greater suffering in the animals themselves. And I think we have to pay much more attention to that equation as we look at the apparent amazing benefits of transgenic research.

Creation of transgenic animals does indeed raise a number of issues that I think we need to be debating very urgently because there is certainly the potential for greater suffering there. I worry a great deal about processes of genetic engineering because I'm rather concerned that we don't always know what the outcome will be of moving one gene from one organism to another. We don't know enough about the way that gene interacts with the physiology it finds itself in.

But we have to come back to this very, very, very awkward balance, a difficult balance. And when I'm asking this question, in a sense, there can't be a definitive answer. But the balance is being made by thoroughly responsible scientists, in my view, and by a state which is trying its best and putting in all sorts of rules and regulations. The balance is, if we do this experiment, we will arrive at a cure for something which is extremely damaging and painful to often millions of people, often, if it wants to be emotional, often millions of children, and therefore are these number of whatever it is,

are they to be subject to this, or are they not? Now, these judgments are made every day in the laboratories, and I agree that they're difficult, but where do you, Linda, where do you, what's your view of this balance? Do you have a clear view? Well, the cost-benefit balance. Yes, that's right. I think it's quite a useful way of looking at things from the purposes of operating the law

and its enshrinement in the 1986 Act was probably beneficial in that sense. The trouble is that it's talked about as though it's a very simple cost-benefit equation, and I don't think it is that simple. You don't? No, I think there's a tendency sometimes to forget that the suffering is born by the animals and that we don't always know exactly the extent to which they are suffering. You talk about being worried that there's not enough emotion in science, it's too reductionist and objective.

How would emotion in science help? I think you will have seen some of the writing I've done which has been looking at the ways in which science papers are written. Sure. And the method section of various, we did a big analysis of method section of various, journal articles. There's an enormous amount of information which is not given, which should be, firstly for the replicability of experiments, which is partly why the method section is there,

but also about how the animals are housed. These may be quite crucial details. I mean, for example, a quarter of the papers won't tell you the number of animals per cage, which might be crucial for a great many physiological and immunological experiments. And there are various other figures. Half don't specify age. in the sample that we had. But we also looked at the ways in which papers are written, and I believe that you've had some comments on this in the past before, Colin. They're written in a way which certainly excludes emotion and excludes agency,

but also plays down what happens to the animal. I agree. I agree. I mean, the nature of scientific presentation is to sanitise emotion, to leave crystallized rationality alone. I mean, there is no space in journal articles for the kinds of things that I think most scientists would want to say about their concerns, about the care that they've taken,

about the choice of the number of animals, about the care that's been given after procedures, and so on. It would get struck out with a red pen by any journal, I mean, it's enormous pressure on space, and it doesn't kind of fit the style, as you say, of presentation of modern science. Can I just ask a final question? of both of you, which is really this,

is there's an increased activity for animal rights, as we know it's going on, in Australia, a singer, and so and so forth, that animals, there's a question as to whether rights can be divorced from responsibilities. I mean, your dog has rights to be looked

after, but as well, will the dog sort of bring you breakfast if you've got flu? I wish. Do you think these two things are on a collision course? And if so, what is going to happen? First Colin Blakemore and then fine, Linda. I think it's something that like liberalism, like capitalism,

it is a movement that will probably continue inexorably. And we have to come to terms with it. I think, you know, we can't hope to have a single equation that's going to work for the whole of the world. That's for sure. I've just come back from India, and the notion of imposing our erudite and luxurious views of the nature of our responsibility towards animals

to a developing community is ludicrous. But I think it's absolutely right that like our attitudes to each other, to minority groups, to the environment, it's actually very, very good that we should embrace our attitude to animals as part of our broad moral perspective. Linda Berg, final word. Yes, I mean, I would welcome that sense of a widening circle, if you like, of understanding about moral responsibility towards all kinds of other animals. And I do think there is a widening circle. So I would say that although, yes, it's been increasing in recent years, protests against the use of animals in science have a very long history. Well, thank you both very much.

Thanks to Professor Colin Blakemore and Dr. Linderberg, and thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4.