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On the video monitor, two small marmosets — tree-dwelling South American monkeys with white ear tufts — cling tightly to each other, looking terrified. A third writhes in pain, postsurgery, on the floor of its cage; others have raw and bloody head wounds that seem crudely stitched up. The animals appear in a 21-minute exposé called Cutting Edge, shot for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in one of Cambridge University's neuroscience research labs. The monkeys' brains had been deliberately damaged in experiments meant to simulate the symptoms of stroke and Parkinson's disease. Important research that could help save human lives — but at an obvious cost in animal suffering.
Filmed secretly in 2001 and screened at a hearing in Cambridge late last year, Cutting Edge was the most graphic evidence presented at what might otherwise have seemed a mundane bureaucratic event: an appeal to government inspectors of a planning application that had twice been denied by the local council. At issue was Cambridge University's proposed $40 million state-of-the-art primate-research facility — a project that is bitterly opposed by animal-rights activists and critically important to the British government, which views scientific research as a top national priority. Although the hearing was meant to consider only prosaic issues such as road traffic and policing, planning inspector Stuart Nixon permitted activists to air their antivivisection arguments.
Nixon eventually recommended that the primate lab should not be built, but Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, under whose office the Planning Inspectorate falls, last month approved it anyway, saying that it would be "strongly in the national interest." Animal-rights groups have vowed to launch a legal appeal, and last week about 30 activists staged a noisy but good-humored demonstration in Cambridge to protest the decision to go ahead with the lab. "We will demonstrate against every brick that goes up," says Sofia Bains, 24, a fitness instructor and animal-rights activist. "Even if the building gets started, it will never get finished."
The Cambridge lab dispute is just the latest front in the animal-rights movement's increasingly sophisticated battle to stop the use of nonhuman primates, dogs, cats, rabbits, rodents and other creatures in scientific and medical research. Without the new lab, its proponents say, the university's world-class neuroscientists will have difficulty staying on the cutting edge of research. But activists fear that this patch of English countryside will soon become the vivisection capital of Europe. Their argument — that experimentation on animals is cruel, unethical, irrelevant and unnecessary — is certainly debatable, but it is undeniably part of an animal-rights campaign that's gaining strength around Europe.
Britain, the birthplace of the antivivisection movement in the 19th century, leads its Continental European neighbors in politicized compassion toward nonhuman creatures. At one end of the spectrum are traditional animal-welfare organizations such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; at the other the sometimes illegal or violent direct actions of entities such as the Animal Liberation Front, which recently paint-bombed the house and car of the director of a chemical company whose parent firm has tested substances on animals.
Though vegetarianism is the biggest issue for animal-rights activists — and fur gets a lot of attention because it involves both celebrities and fashion — the use of animals in scientific research is acquiring a higher profile in the ethical battle for the hearts and minds of policymakers and public alike. Many within the movement apply relentless pressure to stockholders, suppliers and other business contacts, and some — a small substratum — believe that a proper response to violence against animals is violence against humans.
Much of their fury has been directed at the occupants of a sprawling, quiet compound that sits behind black iron gates and a fence topped with coiled razor wire near the Cambridgeshire village of Alconbury. Inside the fence, a sign reads: working for a better future. This is Huntingdon Life Sciences, which tests new compounds for the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and biotechnology industries. Defended by many as one of the world's leading scientific companies, HLS is denounced by others as an "animal Auschwitz" for its vivisection work.
HLS says the research it carries out is crucial to developing a range of new medicines that may ease the suffering of millions, as well as safer chemicals for use in agricultural and industrial products. "If you believe that what you do is essential work, important in protecting people and the environment," says Andrew Gay, the company's marketing director, "you don't get a much more ethical business than ours. In fact, it would be unethical to not do what we do."
Since 1999, HLS has been pounded by a group called SHAC, or Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, formed in November 1999 with one aim: to close down HLS. The group has identified and harassed HLS executives, employees, shareholders, suppliers and partners through telephone, fax and e-mail onslaughts. The SHAC attackers scream "murderer," "pervert" and "torturer" during demonstrations outside HLS's gates. They beat drums and screech on plastic whistles at "home demos" (protests outside the residences of company directors and employees). They mount "invasions" of firms doing business with HLS and industry conferences attended by representatives of HLS and its affiliates.
In early 2002, in an attempt to protect the identity of its shareholders, HLS moved its headquarters — on paper — to the U.S. But this hasn't helped. Since then, HLS has lost numerous business associates, including banks and insurers that stopped doing business with the company because they were tired of the aggravation and fearful for their own workers' safety. HLS board members, too, have stepped down. "We will do our utmost to protect the safety of these people," says Brian Cass, HLS's managing director. But Cass himself was beaten outside his home by masked men in 2001. One man, not connected with SHAC, jailed in the attack was a longtime animal-rights extremist.
HLS has been in business since 1952, but it became notorious much later — on March 26, 1997, to be precise. That's when It's a Dog's Life — an undercover documentary shot inside HLS's canine toxicology laboratory by a video journalist who worked there as a technician for 64 days — was screened on British television. The footage showed beagle puppies being overdosed, young dogs being hit and shaken for wiggling during blood tests, and animals repeatedly poked with needles when their tiny veins proved difficult to locate. HLS came under intense fire from shocked viewers, and the company acknowledged serious mistakes. Three people were fired. Two pleaded guilty to cruelty to animals. The company's share price dropped and clients took their business elsewhere. "The people who were most upset were the people here at Huntingdon, their co-workers," says Cass, who joined the company in September 1998. New policies, training and staff were introduced, he said, "to create a more open, transparent environment so things like that would never happen again." None of it placated the activists, who say they won't rest until they sink HLS for good. "You can't negotiate when lives are being lost," says SHAC spokesman Greg Avery. "The only way you can stop evil is to hit it head on." But many HLS employees "never even see an animal" in their work, retorts Gay. Half of the company's contracted research is in nonanimal-related chemistries. Roughly one-eighth of the work, Gay adds, is in the kind of alternatives that animal-rights groups encourage — in-vitro experimentation and computer modeling. While HLS officials say they've become immune over the years to much of the intimidation and abuse, they refer to some SHAC activists as "loonies" who are "comparable to football hooligans." Lynn Sawyer, a midwife and SHAC activist, finds such characterizations laughable. "I've never met as many nurses and teachers and social workers and people who work in public health care as I have in the animal-rights movement," she says.
The most serious illegal actions against people and property — including the "liberation" of animals from breeding farms — are carried out anonymously, often under such flags of convenience as the Animal Liberation Front, the Animal Rights Militia or the Justice Department. Colin Blakemore, a professor of physiology at the University of Oxford whose medical research has relied on animal tests, was among several scientists threatened with assassination several years ago. Crude devices intended to injure have been sent to his home and office. The violence of a tiny fraction of animal-rights campaigners has stirred alarm even among fellow activists, who say it diverts attention from the real debate.
If Huntingdon had been forced to close, says Cass, Britain would have lost vital pharmaceutical, biochemical and agrochemical research work — "and who's going to invest in the U.K. if a few demonstrators can drive a company out of business?" Once the government understood that, says Cass, it was "tremendous" in its support. Sixteen months after he was assaulted, Cass — a nonscientist — was honored by the Queen for services to medical research. "We happen to be the target now," says Cass, "but it could be someone else tomorrow. The government knows that."
That knowledge has helped fuel the newest animal-testing controversy in Cambridgeshire. In May 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged "concerns about public-safety dangers and unlawful protests" at the proposed university primate lab site, then declared: "We cannot have vital work stifled simply because it is controversial." Says Mark Matfield, executive director of the Research Defence Society and the University's expert witness at the appeal hearing: "Cambridge has world-class scientists. They need the facilities for them to work at that level."
While the proposed lab has no links with HLS, SHAC is also taking a keen interest. "Do these people really think that we're going to let the largest primate-neuroscience lab in Europe be built?" Avery asked at the appeal hearing last December. "We will undermine [the university] tactically, financially, with the press, with the tourists. Cambridge will become known as the animal-cruelty capital of the world." A new animal-rights group, SPEAC (Stop Primate Experiments at Cambridge), took shape over the summer. Denying any formal connection to SHAC, speac announced that it holds the entire university culpable in the matter of the primate lab. To apply pressure for the abandonment of the project, SPEAC began leafleting, organizing demos and targeting university departments with letters and periodic e-mail bombardments.
"This is an issue that is bedeviled by polarization," notes Simon Festing, director of public dialogue for the Association of Medical Research Charities. "The antivivisectionists were getting ahead of the game. Scientists are now catching up and becoming a lot more proactive." It is important, he says, for them to emphasize the link between research on animals and helping to relieve human suffering. "Sadly, the number of people who get to visit labs is small," says Festing. "The majority of animals are running around quite happily in their cages."
When Time visited HLS's dog facility earlier this year, 708 beagle puppies were on hand — all from controlled breeding stock and with decades of background data behind them. "People think we have a lot of very ill animals on site," says Cass. "We're not injecting animals with aids and seeing if we can cure them. All the animals are healthy." The dozens of alert, tail-wagging puppies in one large room — subjects of testing for a potential new anticancer medication — appeared to be healthy, frisky and well looked after. But at the end of any testing period, all the animals involved will be killed and forensic examinations will be conducted on them. "We do get some tears at the end of a study," according to Fred, an animal technician who did not want his real name used. "It's no different than working with terminally ill patients."
Because of client confidentiality, HLS declined to elaborate on exactly what was being tested on the puppies, but acknowledged that the majority of substances tested on dogs were pharmaceuticals, veterinary medicines, flea collars or agrochemical products. New compounds are first screened in nonanimal tests, then on rodents, then on dogs, pigs or monkeys. None is for use in cosmetic products.
While much of the vivisection debate focuses on dogs, cats and monkeys — animals that are either popular human companions or more like us than fish and mice — British statistics for 2002 show that dogs, cats, horses and nonhuman primates were collectively used in less than 1% of the 2.73 million new scientific procedures carried out in the country. The number of new procedures was up by 100,000 — 4.2% — over 2001, and an overwhelming 84% of them involved mice, rats and other rodents, 7% fish, 5% birds and the remainder miscellaneous.
"Good animal welfare," says Cass, "leads to good science." As for animal rights, "personally, that's not something I can subscribe to. Animals kill a lot more animals than humans do. If animals have rights, they have responsibilities, too. But being an accountant, I'm not much of a philosopher." Avery, who disagrees with Cass on so much else, also shies away from the word rights. "Nobody," he says, "is talking about one puppy, one vote." But as the Cambridge dispute shows, that's about all these two camps agree on.
- MARYANN BIRD | Cambridge
- British activists try to stop researchers from using animals in the lab