Unlock the labs!

In short, if the public don't like or won't buy a thing, it has a very limited shelf life indeed.

Not least among the educators and influences has been the National Anti-Vivisection Society.

And this is Lab Animal Week, organised by NAVS. Under the banner "Unlock the Labs", the week will include a huge rally in London, a lobby of parliament, a message to everyone to broach the matters raised with their own MPs, and the wearing of the tiny open padlock badge which is the symbol of the effort. The whole point is to get the subject out of the labs and into the public arena. The NAVS Anti-Secrecy Petition and the "Access Denied" report to the Home Office, launched by the BBC's Here and Now programme, contains the shocking findings of undercover investigations at Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School and the London Institute of Neurology.

Lab Animal Day, an international event recognised by the United Nations, is tomorrow. Campaigners are travelling the country with a "Cages Tour" which gives the public a glimpse of the reality of lab life for animals used in experiments, and there will be street collections in nearly 100 towns and cities.

NAVS Director Jan Creamer said: "It is the fantastic support from thousands concerned about the unnecessary suffering of lab animals, that has transformed a commemorative day we initiated almost two decades ago into Lab Animal Week - the biggest annual event highlighting animal testing. "The theme...is greater openness about vivisection. As the findings of our recent undercover investigation - particularly evidence of neglect of codes of practice, and worrying wastage of life through over-breeding - confirm, we need freedom of information from laboratories to allow public debate on animal experiments and the freedom to support non-animal research techniques such as those backed by our humane research department, The Lord Dowding Fund.

"In a year when Home Office animal testing figures show a rise in the numbers of animal tests, we are counting on public support to get the reality of experiments on live animals back into public debate."

There are many cogent arguments against animal experimentation put forward, not the least of them being that drugs and substances have markedly different effects upon the species - what is harmful to an animal, may be beneficial to a human and vice versa. Penicillin, for instance, is a miracle for humans - but it kills guinea pigs. Had the wonder drug been tested on guinea pigs, it may not have reached the grateful human patients. And studies of people and their habits cannot possibly be reflected accurately by experimentation on animals - they do not smoke, drink or take E.

Morphine, which calms people and rats, excites cats and mice. And would we have the boon of aspirin had it been tested on cats only? Probably not. The drug causes birth defects in cats.

In fact, the introduction of blood transfusions was delayed over 200 years because the results of experiments on animals were misleading.

The Lord Dowding Fund sponsors scientists and projects investigating other methods of experimentation - in the fields of breast cancer, cataracts, dental filling toxicity, kidney dialysis, drugs, cot deaths, lung cancer and animal replacement in safety testing.

On May 10 a major exhibition, the biggest event put on by animal welfare groups and animal-friendly companies even staged in Europe, opens in the Blue Exhibition Hall of The Barbican in London.

This whole field is no longer the tiny preserve of cranks which it was once thought to be, but a valid and vital piece of progress if man is ever, truly, to prove he has a superior intellect to those of the animals he has routinely used, mutilated and mistreated.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.