Juliet Clutton-Brock In Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, Richard W. Bulliet divides the history of human-animal relations into four eras: separation, the time when he presumes that humans or pre-human hominids became self-aware as a species; predomestic, the period of hunter-gathering; domestic, lasting from the Neolithic until, say, 1900, when around 40 per cent of US citizens lived on farms and were self-sufficient on their land; post-domestic, our present age of mass production when only about 2 per cent of US citizens live on farms. These divisions are used by Bulliet as a basis for his hypothesis that the changing patterns of how humans perceive animals, both wild and domestic, are a reflection of the development of societies over time. However, the divisions might have been easier to understand if domestic had been named the “age of the home farm” and post-domestic the “age of the factory farm”. In Bulliet’s view, domestic societies lived close to the land, and people took for granted the killing of farm animals and had few moral qualms about consuming animal products. In early domestic societies, the sacrificial killing of animals was common practice, while later, in Europe, blood sports such as bear- and bull- baiting were immensely popular. In post-domestic societies, there has been a great change, and with the divorce from the realities of keeping, breeding and killing livestock, people experience feelings of guilt, shame and disgust when they think about the industrial processes to which domestic animals are subjected. In future, as urbanism spreads, post-domestic people will be separated increasingly from live animals and they will gain their only experiences of them from print and from the electronic media.

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A documentary film proves that laboratory rats can still survive in the wild. MARK PEPLOW An award-winning film has created some unusual stars: lab rats. The documentary, which follows 75 lab rats after they were released into an Oxfordshire farmyard, has surprised biomedical researchers by proving that lab rats quickly recover their wild behaviour once liberated. Manuel Berdoy, an animal behaviourist from Oxford University, didn’t set out to make a documentary. He was simply curious about whether lab rats retain some of their wild instincts. So he took 75 docile rats that had spent their lives in the laboratory and released them into the wild. Berdoy expected the rats to cope with their new conditions, but he was impressed by how quickly they adapted. The rats found water, food and hiding holes almost immediately. They started to establish social hierarchies within days, and it was only a few weeks before they had established an extensive pattern of paths across the colony. Although the rats had spent their whole lives being fed on pellets, the females immediately prepared for pregnancy by foraging and storing appropriate food. © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2004

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Link ID: 4909 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Geoff Brumfiel A rash of vandalism, intimidation and arson across continental Europe in 2008 is evidence of a worrying new wave of animal-rights extremism being exported from Britain, experts say. In early January, threats led to a Dutch developer withdrawing from a new, €60 million (about US$89 million) biomedical research park in Venray, the Netherlands. A month later, Hasselt University's Biomedical Research Institute in Diepenbeek, Belgium, was set on fire. And in Barcelona in Spain, vandals targeted the offices of biomedical-research firm Novartis. The pattern “is quite clear-cut”, according to Simon Festing, director of the Research Defence Society, a London-based group representing medical researchers. Festing says that he believes new, more stringent enforcement in the United Kingdom has led many extremists to move their activities overseas. “Activists are not finding it easy here,” he says. “So they're just going across to Europe.” Over the past year, the United Kingdom has cracked down on animal-rights activists who break the law. Last May, police carried out Operation Achilles that led to charges against 16 activists. A trial involving several of them is expected to begin later this year. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

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Link ID: 11344 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Notebook by Mick Hume NONE OF MY best friends are chimpanzees or gorillas. I have never had a problem seeing “our closest cousins” as suitable subjects for scientific research that could improve the human lot. Better to be thought a “speciesist” than be a specious sentimentalist. Now scientists have mapped the genetic blueprint of the chimpanzee, establishing that we share almost 99 per cent of functional genes and 96 per cent of our wider DNA. Arguments about our genetic closeness were used to ban experiments on great apes in the UK in 1986. But look at things from the perspective of human liberation for a change, and we could draw the opposite conclusion. Surely it is our genetic similarity to these great apes that could make it medically useful to experiment on them. And it is the yawning difference between us and them that should make it morally acceptable. “The philosophical goal is that we all want to know what makes us human,” says one of the international research team that sequenced the chimp genome. “The pragmatic goal is that it will help us understand diseases and conditions that are unique to humans.” No doubt genetic research will bring many benefits. However, studying the genetic make-up of great apes, or indeed of Homo sapiens, will never tell the full story of “what makes us human”. Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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By Jennifer Squires SANTA CRUZ -- A vandal cut the brake lines on a UC Santa Cruz researcher's SUV late Saturday or early Sunday, and the Police Department has called in the FBI to help investigate. However, unlike prior attacks on UCSC staff, the scientist's work did not involve medical testing on animals, police reported. About seven FBI agents were at the researcher's Westside home Monday afternoon. Some agents peered under the sport utility vehicle to inspect the damage and collected pieces of snipped brake lines in plastic evidence bags. Other agents canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses. The 55-year-old researcher, whose name was not released, called police around 11 a.m. Sunday to report the vandalism to his SUV, which was parked in front of the researcher's house on the 1200 block of Laurent Street, according to Santa Cruz Deputy Police Chief Rick Martinez. "It's not something we see every day," Martinez said, referencing the cut brake lines. "Why was this one vehicle specifically targeted? ... Was this to injure the driver? Was it to send a message? Was it a threat? These are all questions we're trying to sort out right now." University officials had no comment about the incident and referred all questions to Santa Cruz police. A public records search of the house's address cross-referenced with the UCSC faculty directory showed the researcher works in the biology department at UCSC. The Sentinel is not naming the researcher. © 2010 - Santa Cruz Sentinel

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Link ID: 14113 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Amber Dance Scientists in the United States must publicly discuss the merits of animal research if they are to win over the public and neutralize the threat from activists. That was the view of animal-research supporters at a landmark panel discussion yesterday, which saw them come face to face with anti-vivisectionists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In recent years, University of California scientists have faced threats of violence from animal-rights activists, with firebomb incidents at the Los Angeles and Santa Cruz campuses. But Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a vocal supporter of animal research who has faced numerous attacks from activists, said that scientists in the United Kingdom have made progress in dealing with the problem by engaging with the media and the public. "The only way to breakthroughs is to have the courage to be open," Blakemore told Nature. But examples of such dialogue have been few and far between in the United States. "Scientists for a long time have not fulfilled society's expectations of being fully engaged about what they're doing," said J. David Jentsch, a UCLA neuroscientist and founder of the UCLA Pro-Test for Science animal-research advocacy group, before the event. "We really felt the time was ripe." © 2010 Nature Publishing Group

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Link ID: 13782 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway WITH "hormone-free", "cage-free" and "antibiotic-free" becoming common labels on our supermarket shelves, might "pain-free" be the next sticker slapped onto a rump roast? As unlikely as that may seem, progress in neuroscience and genetics in recent years makes it a very real possibility. In fact, according to one philosopher, we have an ethical duty to consider the option. "If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused," says Adam Shriver, a philosopher at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In a provocative paper published this month, Shriver contends that genetically engineered pain-free animals are the most acceptable alternative (Neuroethics, DOI: 10.1007/s12152-009-9048-6). "I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering." I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering Humans consume nearly 300 million tonnes of meat each year. Our appetite for flesh has risen by 50 per cent since the 1960s, and the trend looks set to continue. Most of this will likely come from factory farms, notorious for cramped quarters and ill treatment of animals. Battery farm chickens, for instance, routinely have part of their beaks removed without anaesthetic or pain relief to prevent them from pecking their neighbours. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

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Link ID: 13242 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor The number of animals used in scientific research last year rose by 15 per cent on the previous year bringing the total to nearly 3.6 million - the greatest number of animals involved in laboratory experiments for almost 20 years. Statistics released today by the Home Office showed that the number of experiments involving animals that were started in 2008 also rose by about 14 per cent to just under 3.7 million "procedures", an increase that closely matched the total number of animals used. This represents a 39 per cent increase in animals experiments since Labour came to power in 1997. The number of animals used in experiments had begun to fall in the 1990s but in the past decade it has increased steadily each year largely due to the rise in the number of genetically modified mice used in biomedical research. Last year's increase in the number of animal experiments was the biggest for more than two decades. Lord West, the Home Office minister responsible for regulating animal research, said that an overall increase in the amount of biomedical research carried out in Britain largely explains why there has been such a large rise in the number of animals used in experiments as well as the increase in procedures. "Today's statistics show an increase in the number of procedures being undertaken, and the overall level of scientific procedures is determined by a number of factors, including the economic climate and global trends in scientific endeavour," Lord West said. ©independent.co.uk

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Link ID: 13088 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Peter Fraser ANIMAL welfare legislation generally applies only to vertebrates. There are, however, moves to include invertebrates. Proposed changes to European law, for example, would extend welfare laws to crabs and lobsters. Up to now the only invertebrate protected is the common octopus. "Invertebrate rights" has become a campaigning issue. Advocates for Animals recently produced a report which concludes that there is "potential for experiencing pain and suffering" in crustaceans. The group is particularly concerned about boiling lobsters alive. The wider public is also showing interest. Research supposedly demonstrating that hermit crabs feel and remember pain received worldwide news coverage (Animal Behaviour, vol 77, p 1243). I find the evidence unconvincing. One key argument put forward for protecting crustaceans hinges on similarities between their nervous systems and our own. Such similarities are taken as prima facie evidence that mammals feel pain. Surely this applies to invertebrates too? It is true that crustaceans have neural systems similar in some respects to those involved in human pain, but there are also important differences. The brains of lobsters and crabs have only 100,000 neurons compared with 100 billion in mammals. Their nerves conduct signals 100 times more slowly, and their brains lack the higher centres necessary for a mammal to suffer pain. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

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Link ID: 13043 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Animal rights activists have claimed responsibility for the Saturday firebombing of a vehicle outside a UCLA neuroscience researcher's home, the Daily Bruin reports. No one was injured in the latest in a string against scientists who use animals in their research. There have been at least four firebombings since the beginning of 2008. On Monday, the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which says it speaks on behalf of the activists, posted a statement on its website that threatened to continue to harass the targeted researcher until he stops his study. FBI and university police are still investigating the attack, and extra security has been placed at the home of the scientist, whose name is being withheld. So far, police say they have no leads, but they are offering a $445,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of individuals responsible for the various attacks on UCLA researchers. That includes $25,000 added after Saturday's attack. © 2009 U.S.News & World Report LP

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Link ID: 12636 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Andy Coghlan Seven of the UK's most active animal rights extremists were jailed on Wednesday, receiving sentences of up to 11 years. "These sentences signal the end of the long dark era of animal rights extremism," said Simon Festing of the pro-research organisation, Understanding Animal Research. Globally, however, the situation is far from resolved. In the US, attacks are intensifying and researchers are expecting the new administration to clamp down on offenders. In the UK, the activists were tried for their parts in a six-year campaign to close Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), a company based near Cambridge that undertakes animal research for pharmaceutical companies. The activists' campaign of terror and blackmail, orchestrated by an organisation called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), went well beyond HLS itself, targeting any companies, contractors, shareholders, or individuals with connections to the company. According to Alastair Nisbet of the UK Crown Prosecution Service's Wessex Complex Casework Unit, the conspirators threatened to continue subjecting their victims to blackmail and intimidation unless they agreed to stop working with HLS. The harassment included noisy protests outside business premises; abusive telephone calls, emails and letters; threats of damage to property and physical assault; as well as false allegations of child abuse, hoax bombs, demonstrations and damage to the homes of targets through so-called "home visits". They also sent victims used tampons said to be soaked in HIV-infected blood. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

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Link ID: 12480 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Fergus Walsh Oxford University says the first animals have been moved into a new biomedical sciences centre in the city. The building will bring together animal research currently conducted at around half a dozen facilities in the city. Construction began five years ago but building work halted for more than a year when the contractors pulled out, citing intimidation from animal rights groups. The four storey Oxford animal lab is still surrounded by anonymous wooden hoardings topped with barbed wire. It is ringed with cameras and is a highly secure building. Inside, biosecurity is a key feature. Before getting to see the first animals I had to put on protective overalls, plastic shoe covers and a hairnet. This is mostly to protect the animals from any germs I might bring in. The first animals moved in were mice, which is perhaps appropriate given that rodents will make up 98% of the inhabitants. Eventually there will also be zebrafish, tadpoles, frogs and small numbers of guinea pigs, gerbils and hamsters. There will be no cats or dogs and no farm animals. BBC © MMVIII

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Link ID: 12228 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Greg Miller Early Saturday morning, a Molotov-cocktail-like device set fire to the home of a developmental neurobiologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). His family escaped by climbing down a fire escape from a second-story window. Around the same time, a similar device destroyed the car of another UCSC researcher. As ScienceNOW went to press, no one had claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the university and police suspect they are the work of animal-rights extremists. In recent years, universities and law enforcement officials in the United States have had to grapple with increasingly personal threats, harassment, and attacks on animal researchers and their families (Science, 21 December 2007, p. 1856). California has been an epicenter of such animal-rights extremism: Several biomedical researchers at UC Los Angeles have been targeted in recent years, and more recently, scientists at other University of California (UC) campuses have endured harassment and had their homes vandalized. Twenty-four UC Berkeley researchers and seven staff members have been harassed in recent months, according to a university spokesperson. In February, six masked intruders tried to force their way into the home of a UCSC researcher during a birthday party for her young daughter. Concerns were sparked again last week in Santa Cruz by pamphlets discovered in a downtown coffee shop and turned in to police. Titled "Murderers and Torturers Alive and Well in Santa Cruz," they contained the photographs, home addresses, and phone numbers of 13 UCSC faculty members, along with "threat-laden language" condemning animal research, says Captain Steve Clark of the Santa Cruz police. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Link ID: 11898 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Alison Abbott Zurich's two largest institutes are appealing to the country's supreme court after a lower court decided to ban two primate experiments studying how the brain adapts to change. They say that the ban is a serious threat to all basic research that uses animals in Switzerland. The University of Zurich and the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) announced on 4 June that their local administrative court had ruled against the experiments on rhesus monkeys that had been approved in 2006 by the Swiss National Science Foundation, a funding agency and the Zurich canton's veterinary office, which is responsible for controlling animal welfare. The veterinary office decision was challenged by an external advisory committee on animal experimentation, which argued that the proposed experiments would offend the dignity of the animals. The requirement to consider the 'dignity of creatures' was introduced into the Swiss constitution in 2004. The court did not refer to dignity, but agreed that society was unlikely to see the benefits of the research during the three-year funding period approved, and thus the burden on the animals was not justified. Swiss law requires that the benefit to society must be weighed against the burden to animals before any animal experiment can take place. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

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Link ID: 11709 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ned Stafford An Austrian judge turned down a request this week to appoint a woman as legal guardian of a chimpanzee. The decision is a blow to a growing movement in Europe attempting to give apes some of the legal rights of humans, such as protection from being owned. But proponents of ape rights say they will appeal the decision and continue fighting for the cause elsewhere in Europe. In Spain, for example, they are pushing for a national law that would extend some human rights to apes. Paula Casal, a vice-president of the Great Ape Project branch in Spain, says the Spanish law, first proposed a year ago, might finally be put to a vote soon in parliament. "After that battle is won, then we will have momentum to start organizing groups in other countries to do the same," said Casal, a philosopher at the University of Reading, UK. The goal of the Great Ape Project is to extend basic human rights to apes, such as the right to life, protection of individual liberty and prohibition of torture. Apes are no longer used in most western nations for research, with the United States being a major exception. New Zealand passed an ape rights law in 1999, backed by the Great Ape Project, which prohibits using apes in any experiments that would benefit humans. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

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Link ID: 10226 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden The U.S. Congress has passed a measure that is expected to make it much easier to prosecute animal-rights activists who target enterprises that deal with research animals. Research groups immediately hailed the measure, called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, as a milestone in protecting science, while animal activists warned that it labels peaceful demonstrators as terrorists. The House of Representatives approved the act yesterday by a voice vote, following similar action by the Senate in September. The bill tightens provisions in the existing Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992, which made it a federal offense to interfere with the conduct of "animal enterprises" from university labs to slaughterhouses to circuses. The new measure extends that protection to anyone targeted by activists because they do business with an animal enterprise, including accountants and suppliers. It also calls for reimbursement for economic damages caused to such entities. Offenders will face fines or jail terms ranging from 1 year to life for various forms of harrassment and intimidation, including property damage, trespassing, and death threats. The bill is largely a response to the tactics of a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). Active in both the U.K. and the U.S., SHAC has for years targeted U.K.-based Huntingdon Life Sciences, which uses animals to test drugs, food additives, and pesticides. Last year, SHAC reportedly intimidated the New York Stock Exchange into declining to list Huntingdon's parent company, New Jersey-based Life Sciences Research. © 2006 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Link ID: 9622 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers are working on ways to reduce the need for animal experiments, but new laws may increase the number of experiments needed That ideal world, sadly, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want protection from the toxicity of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. Indeed, the European Commission is forging ahead with proposals that will increase the number of animal experiments carried out in the European Union, by requiring toxicity tests on every chemical approved for use within the union's borders in the past 25 years. Already, the commission has identified 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of these to be examined right away, and plans to spend between €4 billion-8 billion ($5 billion-10 billion) doing so. The number of animals used for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple from just over 1m a year to about 5m, unless they are saved by some dramatic advances in non-animal testing technology. At the moment, roughly 10% of European animal tests are for general toxicity, 35% for basic research, 45% for drugs and vaccines, and the remaining 10% a variety of uses such as diagnosing diseases. Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the hunt for substitutes continues, and last weekend the Middle European Society for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing met in Linz, Austria, to review progress. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2006

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Link ID: 9036 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Brendan O'Neill I've been on a lot of demos in my time, but none quite like Saturday's march in Oxford from Broad Street to South Parks Road to defend the building of a biomedical research laboratory at Oxford University where experiments will be conducted on animals. Animal rights activists have demonstrated against the lab almost every week for the past 18 months; the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a ragbag of self-deluded 'freedom fighters' for animals, even described all academics, students and other workers at Oxford as 'legitimate targets' in its 'war' on the laboratory. On Saturday, the fightback started: around 700 people, a mix of scientists, academics, Home County wives and a generous sprinkling of bright and angry students, marched on the lab shouting such memorable slogans as 'What do we want? The Oxford lab! When do we want it? Now!', and 'Animal research cures disease, Human beings over chimpanzees!' (that one made some of the Home County types a little uncomfortable). The pro-testing protest easily overshadowed the anti-testing protest (which was taking place, as usual, opposite the lab), both on the day itself and in the miles of media coverage that followed. Pro-Test, the group behind the pro-lab demo, is the brainchild of a 16-year-old school dropout from Swindon. He got the idea for it in late January, when he and two friends visited Oxford and decided to scribble the words 'Support progress: build the Oxford lab' on a makeshift placard and parade around the city centre. © spiked 2000-2006

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Link ID: 8615 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Ed Owen It is "the ultimate evil" and "the most intense form of systematic cruelty in the history of humanity". Strong stuff. Yet these are not descriptions of the Holocaust or the genocides of Rwanda or Cambodia. It is how one animal rights group chooses to describe on its website the use of animals in scientific research. And far from being members of a balaclava-clad, extremist fringe, the authors of this rhetoric are from a mainstream organisation called Uncaged, which lobbies the government and works closely with many of our MPs. In the wake of the news last month that Darley Oaks Farm in Staffordshire, which bred guinea pigs for research purposes, was being forced to shut down its business, there has been a renewed focus on the militants within the animal rights lobby who use intimidation and violence to get their way. But in doing so, we must also step up effective scrutiny of the equally uncompromising arguments of those groups that do act within the law. Make no mistake, these so-called moderate organisations are as fundamental in their aims, if not in the tactics, as the hard core. I should at the outset declare an interest. My three-year-old daughter suffers from cystic fibrosis, a life-threatening inherited condition that attacks the lungs and digestive system. About one in every 2,500 babies born in the UK is affected. Our refrigerator and kitchen cupboards are full of medicines that have been developed with the help of animal research. Using these treatments, most sufferers can expect to live until their early thirties with a disease that few used to survive beyond childhood. © New Statesman 1913 - 2005

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Robin McKie, science editor Mike Robins is a man redeemed. Thanks to pioneering surgery, the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease that were wrecking his life are now under tight control. With the flick of a switch, he can turn off the uncontrollable tremors that stopped him holding down a job, having a social life or even getting to sleep. Not surprisingly, Robins reckons he is lucky to be fit and alive. Others are not so sure. At a recent public meeting to discuss a proposed animal research centre in Oxford, 63-year-old Robins was jeered and ridiculed when he tried to show how surgery, perfected through animal experiments, had transformed his life. 'I was bayed at,' said Robins, a retired naval engineer from Southampton. 'Several hundred people were shouting. Some called out "Nazi!", "bastard!" and "Why don't you roll over and die!" I tried to speak, but was shouted down. It was utterly terrifying.' The attack has shocked even hardened observers of vivisection debates. 'I have seen many unpleasant things at these debates, but to scream at a middle-aged man with Parkinson's disease and then tell him he deserved to die is the worst I have observed,' said Simon Festing, director of the Research Defence Society, which defends the scientific use of animals for experimentation. © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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