How Do We Get There?
Creating a world where no-one wants or believes we need to test on animals is not going to be easy. The BUAV and its supporters want animal experiments to end today for both moral and scientific reasons. However, practically this is not going to happen. Here are some suggestions for what we believe could help move us towards our goal.
Ethical evaluation
Ethical review at both the government and local level should be more transparent, more inclusive, more detailed and more thorough.
A national governmental body should constantly review the perceived need for animals in light of public concern for these animals and the value of the research. Research that is not valid, not important, causes more than minimal suffering and, above all is not supported by the public should not be allowed to be conducted. Bans as a matter of ethical principle such as those on great apes or for cosmetics purposes did not rely on alternatives but were due to public concern and the perceived value of this work relative to the suffering caused to the animals. The principle should be extened to the many other areas where there is particular concern about the use of animals. The BUAV believes more bans as matter of principle, such as on experiments for household products, weapons, recreational drugs, food additives or that cause severe suffering or involve primates, can help move society towards being more humane.
The perceived benefits of animal research should be reviewed retrospectively so that the value of the research can be determined and decisions made about funding or licensing such research in the future. A retrospective review, if conducted properly, will also inform decisions in the future about how much the animals are likely to suffer.
Change in scientific mindset
The scientific community is on the whole resistant to change. This might seem counter intuitive but it is well known that scientists tend to explore and innovate within a certain ‘comfort zone’ or paradigm. Currently animal tests are part of the paradigm by which we test drugs, chemical and ideas. A sea-change in attitude both towards animals ethically and scientifically needs to happen. A few things can help this along:
- Eminent scientists should speak out about animal experiments. This tends to happen on an ad hoc/personal basis but occasionally groups of scientists do come together and decide a better way forward. Examples include when key drug companies came together to announce that they did not feel acute toxicity tests on animals were necessary and the US National Academy of Sciences proposed a way forward for toxicology research, ultimately without using animals.
(A European pharmaceutical company initiative challenging the regulatory requirement for acute toxicity studies in pharmaceutical drug development. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology 2008; 50: 345-52 Committee on toxicity testing and Assessment of environmental agents (2007) Toxicity Testing in the Twenty-first Century: A Vision and a Strategy. National Academy of Sciences, USA.) - Funding bodies should give priority to non-animal research. This would send a clear message out to scientists about the value of non-animal methods and reward those who are working in this area
- Scientific journals should encourage the submission of results from non-animal research. At the very least they should require scientists to explain in their articles what efforts they made to use alternatives and explain how they have cared for the animals they did use and what symptoms they experienced.
- Scientists should be educated about the need to search for alternatives. This process should be more transparent and evidence provided for the lack of alterative methods at all levels (registration, funding, ethical review, publication). The BUAV believes use of alternatives should not be considered in the narrow ‘like for like’ sense but in the broader sense that an alternative would answer the same question posed by the scientist or would provide information of equal quality. Similarly, sometimes the ‘alternative’ may be found at governmental policy level. For example, changing to an opt-out system for organ donation – under which people would need to say in advance if they did not want their organs donated on their death – would go a long way to solving the organ shortage and therefore reduce or eliminate the need for cruel xenotransplantation research on animals.
- Encouragement of ethical awareness in young scientists. Ethics and scientific methodology should not be viewed as entirely separate issues. We cannot separate ethics from other important areas of our lives, there is no reason why we should do so for science.
Alternatives
Development of and use of existing and new alternative methods should be encouraged by:
- Regulatory bodies should invest to speed up the validation process and ensure that new methods are implemented across the board. By validation we mean showing that a method works and is reliable.
- Governmental and institutional funding of large scale replacement programmes
- Funding of bodies that validate and promote alternatives such as the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) should be increased and their remit broadened if necessary.
- Governments should encourage a greater understanding of the validation process for alternatives and provide incentives to validate and use promising new methods rather than never-endingly seek to understand them. In doing so governments will try to create a level playing field for alternatives compared to animal tests that at the moment do not have to undergo such a rigorous evaluation.
Political motivation
Action is unlikely to happen without significant political will within government and national and international institutions. The value to science, medicine and human society of ceasing to use animals needs to be appreciated and then this will facilitate the mechanisms above that may be needed in order to eradicate it.
Financial incentives can help, as can targets for reduction in animal numbers or outright bans on certain uses of animals. Imminent bans, for example on primate use, provide focus for the development of alternatives. It is widely accepted that the ban on the use of cosmetics, which happened without all alternatives being in place, has lead to a significant increase in investment in alternatives and their subsequent development. The cosmetics industry has not been deterred from being innovative. A similar situation is happening with REACH (chemicals testing).
