From Mouse to Man

"How intelligent does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?"

That thought provoking question was asked by Carl Sagan while pondering what traits make us so uniquely "human" that we may form moral guidelines which leave us free to inflict injury, pain and crippling disease on other living creatures. Does a Dalmatian have the ability to communicate with other members of her species, with a language distinctive to her own kind? Can a pig possibly possess a conscious memory of its past, or the foresight to see what lies ahead? Perhaps not - what talents then should a creature possess to safeguard it from exploitation by another species? In the quest for medical knowledge, in particular, we are compelled to examine our own morality in terms of the fair treatment of animals. Unfortunately, the human failing lies in the belief that we can successfully police ourselves. As George Orwell put it: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."

The abuse began long ago. Erasistratus of Alexandria, was the first to record the mutilation of live animals to study the body humors in 3rd century B.C. He was followed of course, by many other advocates of using live animals for experimentation, such as Galen, Francis Bacon and Rene' Descartes. Galen severed the nerves of live pigs and recorded the inevitable and predictable results. Descartes, the 16th century French philosopher, maintained that animals were incapable of emotional response, of feeling distress or pain. Unfortunately, this system of belief dominated medical research well into the 18th century.

Whether or not there was opposition to this treatment of animals in Galen's time, or in the succeeding generations which heard the views of Descartes, is unclear, but in 18th century Europe, other opinions were being expressed. Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century English philosopher and leader of the Utilitarian movement, did not subscribe to the theory that animals exhausted their purpose beyond a laboratory. In 1789 he authored the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in which he wrote "a full grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the cause were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer?"

For the most part, the public was quite unaware of the depth and nature of the anatomical experiments that were being conducted in dank basements recklessly referred to as private laboratories. Only the occasional escape of a captured animal with its entrails protruding from its body brought the message home, especially when one discovered the animal was in fact a pet that had mysteriously disappeared from the front stoop. People became outraged when their pets were being stolen by persons who posed as "dealers" and sold the animals to the scientist, or simply presented them as strays. Until the breeding laboratories of the 20th century, stolen and stray animals often fell prey to the knife, since animals were not a readily renewable source for the scientist. Unfortunately, many experimenters were successful in convincing authorities that the sacrifices made were warranted for the sake of furthering medical knowledge.

The struggle with the morality issue had given birth to two schools of thought and each campaigned heavily to be heard in the political arena. The antivivisectionists aroused public awareness by exposing the horrific procedures being conducted in the laboratory. The scientists argued that their experimentation on animals had genuine scientific merit. The public, sympathetic to both causes, were divided in their perception of the truth.

Finally, in 1871, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, drafted a code of ethics which urged that an experiment should not be carried out if it could not be done without an anesthetic; the demonstration of a pain inducing experiment was not deemed a valid teaching tool in itself; that experimentation in which the animal may experience discomfort should not be performed by a novice as a means to condition them to a harsh response from their subject; and that generally, one should not perform unnecessary operations on live animals for the purpose of practicing their skill with a knife.

By this time, the growing numbers of animal activists and many members of the scientific community were calling for responsible legislation, closing the gap between them. In 1876, England enacted the Cruelty to Animals Act which prohibited experimentation by those who were unregistered to carry them out. The Act also minimized animal suffering by making anesthesia mandatory; it also regulated the sites and conditions where the experiments were to be conducted. Unless one applied for a permit. With a permit, any one or all of these sanctions could be compromised, making the new law, and the public, subject to manipulation. The battle for new, more effective legislation continued relentlessly for the next 100 years.

It was nearly that long before Americans saw any progress in regulating animal experimentation. Since the 1940's numerous watchdog organizations have emerged to pressure the scientific community and legislators to adopt standardized procedures to protect animal rights. Among the well known: The United Action for Animals and Friends of Animals, the Animal Welfare Institute, the American Humane Association and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the group responsible for raiding many laboratories and liberating animal subjects.

On August 24, 1966, the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act was passed to prevent stolen domestic animals from illegally falling into the hands of research facilities. Prior to the passage of this law, the Humane Society of the U.S. estimated that 50% of cats and dogs separated from their owners were sold to research labs. The Act also required research labs and dog dealers to register with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Since 1966, there have been numerous amendments to the Animal Welfare Act, most significantly in 1985. The Improved Standards for Laboratory Animals Act and the Health Research Extension Act were passed which have had a direct impact on the standard of medical research today. Under this legislation, research labs are required to investigate alternatives to using animals, to limit the scope of major surgery to one procedure per animal, to confer with a veterinarian before conducting any procedure in which pain would result, and to succumb to the periodic supervision of a non-affiliated liaison to ensure the humane care and treatment of each animal.

According to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), more than 3,000 physicians in the U.S. speak out against using animals as models for humans. Dr. Ron Allison, an Oncologist in Buffalo, New York, states that, "animal testing is a slow, expensive and unreliable means to gather information. The problem is that you have to extrapolate from a cross species and it's just fraught with too many uncertainties." Dr. Allison cites the analogy that diagnosis and treatment cannot be exchanged from an adult to a child, or even male to female, since the biological behavior between these groups vary. "If it's so difficult to have things work the same way from an adult to a child, how can you go from a mouse to a man?"

"Another difficulty," Dr. Allison explains, "is that one animal model will give you a positive result, while another will give a negative result, so you never know what's really going on. The results are too often misleading."

According to Dr. Allison, animal testing is on the decline in the area of cancer research. "Animal research has been so slow and unreliable, that it's been replaced on many levels. For instance, the National Cancer Institute no longer screens new drugs or anti-cancer compounds on animals because the results were so poor. They now use in vitro, non-animal models with very exciting results." Using animals to test these new drugs is, to Dr. Allison, "a very poor methodology."

Where do we stand on this issue today? Europe set the example to follow in the 1980s by proclaiming a halt on all animal testing related to the cosmetic industry. The U.S. and Canada still resist the urging of most of the globe in joining this campaign. Colgate-Palmolive has finally announced a moratorium on animal testing for their personal care products after years of enormous pressure from PETA (Peoples Ethical Treatment of Animals). Progress yes, but only last year it was revealed that the March of Dimes organization spends approximately $1 million annually on animal testing, subjecting infant animals to the effects of alcohol, nicotine and cocaine to study birth defects. And in the medical arena? More than half of the medical schools operating in the U.S. have dropped live animal labs to teach their students in favor of computer simulated models. Duke University and the University of Washington (St. Louis) still persist in the practice. And, only last year, U.S. Vice President Al Gore launched a program called the High Production Volume Challenge (HPV) that will force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to require animal testing on more than 2,800 industrial chemicals by the end of this year. What are some of the chemicals on this list? Turpentine, rat poison and tetraethyl lead - the anti-knock agent found in leaded gasoline. Not only is it blatantly obvious that these chemicals pose a risk to humans and the environment, but there is already an abundance of existing data to evidence this.

Take Action

What can you do? Contact PCRM (http://www.pcrm.org) to find out how you can get involved in convincing your local institutions to forfeit the use of live animals and explore alternative methods that are cheaper and more reliable.

While the use of animals in the testing laboratory is indeed waning, there is still much progress to be made. But, we can recall the issue with song each year when, on Christmas Day, the National Zoo in Washington is serenaded by activists who help us to remember that, "On the 12th day of Christmas, the A-L-F set free: 12 grateful turkeys, 11 lions roaring, 10 birds a-soaring, 9 pet shop puppies, 8 trapped coyotes, 7 crippled kittens, 6 blinded rabbits, 5 chimpanzees, 4 micropigs, 3 veal calves, 2 guinea pigs and a rat from a laboratory."