if there were armed guerrilla’s violently attacking people in the name of evidence based medicine, i would be the first to stand up and condemn them, distancing myself from their activities, and perhaps even trying to open a public and transparent dialogue, arguing with them to change their methods. this seems not to be the case with mainstream antivivisection campaigners, and to that extent, i find them very unpleasant.

I sat on a university Animal Experimentation Ethics Committee (AEEC) as a Animal Welfare representative about 7 years ago in Australia. I know at the time several university AEECs had statisticians either sitting on the committee or advising them because of several of the points you make regarding using a statistically valid sample. As an animal welfare rep I was one of the “antivivisection people” and it is a concern that many people (both “pro” and “anti”) have.

Of course the papers do like to pick up on the extremist vibe, there are alot of people who are involved in the movement against animal experimentation who have strong scientific backgrounds who do argue against animal experimentation on grounds of poor science, which has been highlighted by the research in the post.

In the same way that nuclear power stations are expected to have better health and safety records than any other industry in th UK simply because of public perception, so too should animal testing have squeeky-clean methods.

>Animal experiments are necessary
>But it’s easy to assess whether animals are treated well
>Only 12% of the animal studies used randomisation.
>Only 14% used blinding.
>People who threaten the lives of 15-year-old girls

The problem starts when the pro-testers don’t live up to their claims. By the figures above, hasn’t PETA has been *entirely* *correct* 86%-88% of the time when they claim testing is evil and pointless? Pity Mr Goldacre can’t bring themselves to considder this.

There is also the recent horror story about fox hunting. No, not the hunting, no not the banning. But the serious questioning that foxes might suffer if they were running for their lives. While I agree that you can easily measure suffering, it is also blatantly obvious that when large sums of money are at stake, a large percentage of people chose to lie. Strange that Mr Goldacre is seemingly unaware of this very recent and well publicised ‘contraversy’.

But not really surprising. If you gave them a choice between conducting a truely necessary but harmful experiment on either a group of chimps, or a group of severely mentally ill orphans, they’d all choose the chimps. They would maintain this choice even if you gave them ccompletely solid evidence that these specific humans were no more intelligent than the chimps. (This is what is known as a ‘special case’.) Even if you pointed out the human testing would be much more accurate. And the problem with the reasoning they’d give (humans are special) is that it is basically alternative medicine – that which cannot be proven to be true, or that which has actually been proven to be not true.

As to 15 year old girls… I’m shocked. Really I am. Aren’t there several important queestions we shoudl be asking before we make succh sweeping generalisations? Have we reduced the number of participants to the bare minimum? Can we reduce the suffering by refinement? Is it possible to replace this with another method? Well, the answers are no, no, and no. It’s down to one and nothing else has worked. Surely therefore by your own standards…

Incidentally, the 4th R really should be ‘redirection’. Are you flogging a dead horse so hard that you are draining funds from more worthy research? For example many cancer treatments are not chemical (drugs) but rather physical (radiation) and mechanical (microsurgery). Given that cancer can happen in a thousand different ways (or more) then killing thousands of animals each year for each specific variation is a very questionable practice, when the alternatives offer solutions that are potentially far more generic, quicker, and cheaper.

When scientists reject science before they even start experimenting on animals (which they do, as demonstrated above) then the results are going to be screwed up and unscientific. Which again brings us back to PETA being right the vast majority of the time.

@Keith19 said

“In my opinion this is one of the areas that the pharmaceutical industry is leading academia in basic science animal research. Randomisation and assessing statistical power before an experiment is carried out is the norm……This is presumably because mistakes at this point in the research, either false positives or negatives, can end up costing the companies millions.”

That is correct. To take that forward, there are three comments I would like to make:

a) The pharmaceutical industry behaves in a few instances in a terrible way once those millions are committed, and allows human clinical trials to be corrupted. Exactly the same as the animal scenario where poor practices allow a whole mode of research to be attacked.

b) As the in animal welfare problem the deviants are not properly punished in the interests of the non deviants.

c) Many of these pharmaceutical animal studies are not published. The TGN1412 disaster is an example of where that leads. No matter how good these studies might be in informing industry where to risk their billions, they are therefore not part of science.

This site seems like a great resource. I just wanted to chime in after reading the first few comments to this post.

Since I can remember (and I do eat meat and support hunting and use of animal materials), the notion of man having dominion over every other animal was disturbing and clearly a product of the ego.

My suspicion (I prefer not to believe things) is that it’s doing more harm than good to experiment (which is light torture imo) on animals. Although I don’t know much about this, I don’t think you have to be in the “expert class” to know that it’s karma of the worst kind.

I know, all the great advancements and the lives saved. But that implies that a human life is some how important, while animals are relegated to serve us. Take a dog, for instance. A dog is very willing to help a human, as are humans willing to help dogs. But, don’t they deserve to be willing participants. If an animal could comprehend the situation, I’m sure some would offer to assist. That’s the real tragedy.

What’s with zoos, while I’m at it? I hear that, despite how great they are some are failing in this economy. Are you wondering for even a moment what they are doing with the “stars of the show”, now that the show has been canceled. I digress, and apologize for leaning towards ideology.

What does science have to say about animal rights? I think it is not their expertise. Yet, they are charging ahead. But hey, that’s society as the collective intellect expands and then shrinks.

How about this? I encourage anyone in favor of animal experimentation to attend a native American ritual vision-quest. If, afterward they are still in favor then I have more to learn. But, we are all free to do as we will.

That wasn’t bad. I look forward to more peeking around here. I fear what I will find in the areas of false-flag terror, and terrorism for that matter. And why do suicide bombers blow themselves up? Is it narcissism?

I used to be an animal technician, and did the job because I love animals (surprisingly enough, a lot of people do it for that reason). I worked in a lab that was regulated by GLP – e.g. not a research facility, and I completely agree with Ben when he says we have some of the strictest regulation in the world. I also took some quite serious abuse from animal-rights activists in my time, and found them to be ill-informed, reactionary and attention-seeking. But maybe that was just me. They weren’t even from PETA.

I can go into more detail on the subject if anyone is interested; I can type at length about animal testing, animal rights and the pharmaceutical industry from personal experience.

Companies listed either have signed PETA’s statement of assurance or provided a statement verifying that they do not conduct or commission any animal tests on ingredients, formulations, or finished products and that they pledge not to do so in the future

This may be a step forward for those who wish to use ‘cruelty free’ products but doesn’t come anywhere near a statement that ingredients have not been tested on animals. The assurance merely means that the company you buy from hasn’t tested anything on animals not that the ingredients in the things you buy from them haven’t been tested on animals by other people.

I would be very surprised if many of the ingredients in cruelty free cosmetics and household products have not, at some point, been tested on animals.

There are other animal rights organisations that (a) aren’t violent and (b) aren’t PETA. I wish they could get more media attention, but unfortunately the media aren’t interested in sober and useful debate, they’re more interested in PETA’s obsession with naked women.

It is true that in the EU the Cosmetics Directive prohibits the testing of cosmetics on animals. However most of the ingredients currently used in cosmetics have already been tested at some point on animals. Secondly, you will find very few ‘new’ ingredients being used in cosmetics other than those that have been tested on animals for other non-cosmetic purposes.

Finally the REACH regulation in effect requires all substances manufactured or imported into the EU for any purpose (including cosmetics) to have relevant data which in many cases can only be obtained by animal experiments. The European Parliament has not yet resolved the inconsistency between these two legal instruments but then a high level of cognitive dissonance is a requirement for all MEPs.

No – I’m not missing the fundamental point. The same number of animals suffered during animal testing of cosmetics, irrespective of how many people bought them. The groundswell of opinion against animal testing of cosmetics resulted in the development of animal-friendly products by companies who shared those ethical values and saw a business opportunity. Once a sufficient number of consumers moved their custom to the animal-friendly options, some of the mainstream cosmetics companies revised their practices. This shift in buyer behaviour, coupled with legislation, has helped us get to the point where there is no need for anyone to buy cosmetics or household products that have been tested on animals at any point during their manufacture.

If I use drugs that are tested on animals, then I am helping perpetuate animal-testing – however small my contribution. The reason I think it is important that we understand the cost of particular products in terms of animal suffering is so that we can make a balanced choice.

The argument you put forward is the same as the one many people use for buying air-freighted, out of season fruit and veg from supermarkets. ‘Well, if I don’t buy it, it will go to waste, and the same number of airmiles will have been used anyway’. Yes they will. But if supermarkets are left with rotting fruit and veg because consumers refuse to place their desire for choice above concern for the environment, then supermarkets will eventually take notice and stop.

Have a good, animal-friendly weekend.
HelenC

Your question on the quality of the journals is addressed by the authors:

“In fact, the search retrieved papers from a range of publication
years (1999 – 2005), covering a wide variety of research areas, and an extensive range of journals across the impact factor spectrum, including Nature and Science. Whilst it would be useful to know if there is a relationship between the quality of the papers surveyed and the impact factors of the journals they were published in, this analysis was not in the remit of this survey.”

Damn straight it would be useful. I think the importance in the distinction between quality of reporting and quality of research has been adequately made here. The authors justify the link between the two as follows:

“…this kind of reporting omission can easily be rectified. But if not, incomplete reporting masks potentially flawed experimental methods.”

Potentially, but I think I’d agree with Mosche in that I’m unsure how valid the link between what the authors consider to be ‘bad reporting’ and the validity of the experiment is, particularly when the authors state that, for example, if the assessors did not understand the aim of a study then it was reported as not having an aim listed. They justify this by saying that this means that non non-specialist would understand the aim of the study but, given that this is not a text book, why should that reduce the relative validity of a study? Communication of science is great and all, and should absolutely be encouraged and celebrated (avid reader by the way, Ben) but specialists are the ones who will read the research, assess it in context and conduct further research accordingly. The fact that it can’t necessarily be understood by professors of political science doesn’t mean that it wasn’t appropriate and necessary to use animals in the study.

By Mosche
“…I missed the list of the actual papers under scrutiny. I guess there are pretty obvious reasons not to give details of what papers did the whole thing wrong but yet … it is a crucial point in the Methods section of this paper that should be included if anyone wants to check and reproduce their results. Does this make it a solid study? Well, in my opinion this is at least as bad as what the authors are trying to criticize.”

Boom.

In rejecting the eczema cream, you seem to have missed the fundamental cause-effect issue: The same number of animals are treated the same way regardless of whether one thousand, or one million, people have their symptoms relieved.

A more reasonable question to ask yourself is “Given that these animals are already dead, am I really helping them by avoiding this product?”

Drug testing doesn’t scale like leather shoes or eating meat: Using less doesn’t mean any animals are protected.