In 2013 the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (OCAE) was commissioned by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) and Cruelty Free International to produce an independent review of the ethics of using animals in research.

The BUAV is not a neutral bystander in the debate about animal testing, but it was prepared to commission independent academic research on this topic.

OCAE was founded in 2006 to pioneer ethical perspectives on animals. The centre is independent, and is not under the aegis, control or sanction of the University of Oxford.

The report was written by a working group consisting of 20 academics from six countries. It focuses on the ethical dimension from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, science, history, theology, law, critical animal studies and sociology.

It was endorsed by Nobel Laureate for literature JM Coetzee and 150 other academics and intellectuals.

OCAE released this summary of its report on April 13.

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More than 115 million animals are used in experiments globally each year.

The deliberate and routine abuse of innocent, sentient animals involving harm, pain, suffering, stressful confinement, manipulation, trade, and death should be unthinkable. Yet animal experimentation has become the “normalisation of the unthinkable”.

This use of animals flies in the face of what is now known about the extent and complexity of animal awareness, especially animal sentience — defined as the capacity to experience pain and pleasure.

Unlike our forebears, we now know that animals — notably, mammals, birds and reptiles — experience not only pain but also shock, fear, foreboding, trauma, anxiety, stress, distress, anticipation and terror to a greater or lesser extent than humans. This is the conclusion of many scientific books and scientific papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Since scientific experiments cause not only physical and/or psychological harm but also death, it follows that they require strong moral justification.

The acceptance of animal experimentation is reinforced by an overconfidence in animal experiments as a scientific technique.

However, new scientific critiques raise issues of the unreliability of animal experiments; the unpredictability of laboratory environments; the difference between human diseases and “animal models” of disease; the differences in physiology and genetic function of different species; and the development of more predictive human-based testing.

The upshot is that it is no longer accurate or reasonable —if it ever was — to say that the only moral choice is between experimenting on animals and giving up on scientific progress.

The acceptance of animal experimentation is also based on the idea that animals are just tools for human use, means to human ends and commodities that can be treated and dispensed with as humans think fit.

In the past 40 years, much has been written on the ethical status of animals. This new work has challenged the ideas that humans should always have absolute priority in our moral thinking (moral anthropocentrism); animals exist for human beings, to serve their interests and wants (instrumentalism); and humans should be distinguished and separated from other animals as “them” and “us” (dualism), in which animals are inevitably denigrated. The notion that we “own” animals has been a direct result of these assumptions and has been codified in almost all legislation worldwide.

This acceptance is challenged by new moral thinking that centres around three positions. The first proposes that individual animals have worth in themselves. As sentient beings, they are not just things, objects, machines or tools; they have their own interior life that deserves respect.

Second, there can be no rational grounds for not taking animals’ sentience into account or for excluding individual animals from the same basic moral consideration that we extend to individual human beings.

Third, it follows that causing harm to individual sentient beings — except when it is for their own good, such as in a veterinary operation — requires strong moral justification. Indeed, some would argue that acts of harming innocent sentients is absolutely wrong.

Because they are not moral agents, animals cannot merit or deserve suffering, and they cannot be morally improved by it. This means that all the usual justifications for inflicting suffering do not apply in the case of animals.

Rationally, justifying harm to animals — like harm to human infants — should be especially difficult.

Like infants, animals cannot give or withhold their consent; they cannot represent or vocalise their own interests; they cannot understand or rationalise their suffering; they are morally innocent or blameless; they are vulnerable and relatively defenceless. So it is inconsistent to justify the maltreatment of animals while opposing maltreatment of humans on the basis of species alone.

The moral arguments in favour of animal experimentation are flawed. The UK government’s Animal Procedures Committee (APC) (2003) argued that even if inflicting suffering is an “intrinsic” wrong, it may not be an “absolute” wrong if it can “be shown to be the lesser of two wrongs that we have to choose between”.

But that argument supposes that there is a direct or immediate choice to be made, which the APC acknowledges is extremely rare: “in animal research we are rarely, if ever, presented with the stark situation in which we can save the life of a child by taking the life of an animal”. In fact, in the entire history of experimentation on both humans and animals, there has not been one direct choice of the kind supposed.

The House of Lords Select Committee (2002) argues that humans are “unique” and that “therefore” they can use animals in experiments. But this is a non sequitur. What has to be shown is how humans are unique and how that justifies inferior moral treatment of animals.

The Weatherall Committee (2006) argues that we are justified in experimenting on animals because, in the case of a hospital fire, we would “intuitively” choose to save the human patients.

But the conclusion does not follow. All that follows — if the scenario is to be believed — is that humans will in the given situation respond in that way. The scenario is by definition a limited crisis situation in which one has to make a direct choice.

But to argue from that one situation, in which most people may choose to save fellow human beings, to a supposed duty to choose human beings in a wide range of situations, where there is no direct choice to be made, does not make sense.

The special pleading, reliance on selected crisis situations and the lack of a cogent argument makes the Weatherall report unpersuasive as a moral defence of experiments on animals.

Acceptance of animal experimentation is also reinforced by the institutionalisation of animal experiments through legislation; institutional and establishment thinking; public and private funding; the partiality of the media; and the language of experimentation, which obscures, justifies, exonerates, and minimises what actually takes place in laboratories. The result of these factors is moral stagnation and resistance to change.

This acceptance is validated by a range of regulations and controls, which in reality do very little to protect animals and indeed often do the reverse. Inspections are flawed; licensing creates a false sense of legitimacy; supervised self-regulation in the EU is inadequate; and care and ethics committees do not provide a rigorous evaluation of proposals from an ethical perspective and are fundamentally flawed in not addressing the basic ethical issue.

The Three Rs — Replacement, Reduction and Refinement — which is supposed to result in humane laboratory-based research, is endorsed by the EU. Governments pay lip service to the Three Rs but in practice they are massively underfunded and ineffectual.

Even where controls exist, they are found wanting. This is confirmed by disturbing evidence provided by undercover investigations.

Animal experimentation is often justified by the assertion that human interest requires such experiments. But we should question whether humans have ever benefited by the abuse of animals.

In fact, humans can be harmed — by desensitisation, loss of empathy, habituation, and denial. We now know that there is a strong link between animal abuse and violence to human beings.

New scientific evidence must make us challenge the claim of utility, since we now know that many experiments have provided misleading or erroneous results.

The same logic that justifies experiments on animals also justifies the practice in relation to humans. Prisoners of war, people of colour, Jewish people, children and many others have been subject to experimentation.

This normalising of the unthinkable needs to be de-normalised and deinstitutionalised. Ethical research techniques need to be fully institutionalised, and there should be a massive switch of funding to non-animal replacement techniques as a matter of urgency.

[Normalising the unthinkable: the ethics of using animals in research is a new assessment of whether animal experiments can be justified morally. It was written by the Working Group of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, and commissioned by the BUAV and Cruelty Free International. You can read the full report here or visit BUAV or Cruelty Free International.]

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