SOCIETY TODAY

Poor vivisected doggy

John Linklater

Vivisection is the act of cutting open a living animal. According to a recent nationwide anti-vivisection poll, only 4 per cent of the 'population know what the word means. I would go further, and declare that less than 4 per cent of the anti-vivisectionists themselves really understand what they are opposing, or what could be the implications of a successful antivivisection crusade.

Here, then, is a group of highminded, thoughtful people, which accuses another group of acting inhumanely, without mercy, and with reckless disregard for the sufferings of lesser creatures. Medical students, dons, doctors and all those in research projects using animals, also see themselves as high-minded idealists; they tend to regard anti-vivisectionists as an ignorant pain in the neck. It is worth attempting to disentangle fact from fiction, if only to forestall the ludicrous ultimate of all anti-discrimination Bills.

The problem is mainly one of communication. The statistical basis upon which anti-vivisection societies depend is not in dispute. Their language and interpretation is. They exploit emotion. Anti-vivisection literature asks, in general, whether "the journey of nearly six million animals annually to the scrubbed clinical table of the experiment" is necessary. A specific case is then often quoted, chapter and verse, in which a gruesome thing indisputably was done to a dog, and did cause it some pain. We then hear that 86 per cent of the six million experiments were carried out without anaesthesia, and inevitably build an impression as of some scene from the French Revolution. Each minute of the day and night a tumbril trundles by with ten little dogs or cats, stiff upper lip, pathetic and helpless, bound for a bloody death. All who work in medicine, physiology, pathology, pharmacology and toxicology are treated by the anti-vivisection journals as a simple, sinister and amorphous band, only interested in self-aggrandisement or furtherance of personal aim. They are grouped together as vivisec tionists, as if they could be looked up in the yellow pages under this heading.

The purpose of research projects is never described in anti-vivisection literature. Projects are mentioned as if they were but haphazard and wanton acts of cruelty. The anti-vivisectionist sees himself as on a crusade against the secret scheming of the mad scientist; closed, closely guarded doors and all. No further intellectual discussion or justification therefore seems necessary. There is no other side to the question. All is reduced to the emotional level.

Consider again the statistics. The vast majority of the much publicised six million animals are not mammals, but from the lower orders of frogs, fish, flatworms and other crawlies. Most of the mammals are rats or mice, and most of the remainder are guinea pigs. Very few are cats or dogs. Half of these animals will be controls, and live a normal, healthy and prolific life until humanely put down. A great number of the frogs, rats, rabbits and dogfish, are for dead dissection and not in any sense vivisected. Neither is the greater number of living animals used for anything that could remotely be called vivisection. Yet all these categories are included in the total.

Common sense, and a moment of reflection, would show the anti-vivisectionist that a dog bought or bred, fed, kept and tended in a well ventilated, warm, dry animal house may cost the laboratory some £25 by the time that it is used. This nation could not spend £150 million a year on animal research material alone, and the pathetic journey of the much advertised six million is thus far more likely to end swimming about in a dish under a microscope than spurting blood on the aforesaid scrubbed clinical table.

The average laboratory animal house would teach the public a thing or two about animal care. A feeble, frightened or seedy animal does not give uniform or useful results, and great emphasis is placed therefore, if for no more humane reason, on maintaining healthy and contented stock. When a new penicillin or other drug is to be treated for teratogenicity, for example, several well balanced families of rats are fed on oats and penicillin, and encouraged to breed. An equivalent number of control families of rats from the same clone live a never-had-it-so-good, and equally prolific, life on oats alone. The offspring are then compared for abnormalities: all of which is anathematised as vivisection.

I often wonder how many true anti-vivisectionists contribute to the thalidomide disaster fund, and how they reconcile the incompatible. Do they bitterly regret that a wider range of animals was not sacrificed, at that time, in breeding studies using thalidomide, so that the vicious teratogenicity of that drug would have been disclosed, or are they glad that animals were spared from the misery of bearing deformed young?

I do not argue, however, that there is no place for emotional censorship. Mankind is proven capable of nailing the Son of God to a gallows, of creating a Belsen and a Buchenwald and of formulating neat and sophisticated legislation for putting the unborn young of man to death at the dictates of social convenience. Man is therefore certainly capable of perpetrating dreadful acts of cruelty towards his four-footed cousins in the clay. The impartial token control over animal research, provided for in, the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, should certainly remain.

The principal safeguard against cruelty comes not from the statutory inspectorate so much as from the very nature of the people who undertake research. The average professor of physiology, his dons and his medical students, are educated and thoughtful people. None would willingly hunt an innocuous animal. Beyond this, however, every project is carried out with an ever-present jury of typists, clerks, cleaners and watchmen who would be the first to object to any cruelty. I am therefore not in the least surprised that no application for a licence has ever been refused and that no prosecution for cruelty has ever been brought under the Act.

The anti-vivisection societies have only themselves to blame if they are eefused access to laboratories. It is all too easy to make irresponsible journalistic capital by describing isolated hearts beating, and headless dogs breathing, without mentioning either the painfree nature, or the value, of the research. You cannot expect to be welcome where you have accused the workers of a form of sadism and wanton cruelty.

There are basically three antivivisection groups. The oldest is the RSPCA, which claims that it is not an anti-vivisection society and " accepts that a certain amount of experimental work on animals is unavoidable." It leaves the matter baldly thus, however, and goes on to develop the old theme of cruelty and suffering caused by "scientists in pursuit of their per

sonal aspirations." It never reports any animal research as having valid purpose, and thus discloses its true position by talking of the made scientist.

The newest, and most enlightened group is FRAME* which adopts some realistic objectives. It has announced a forward-thinking programme of replacement of whole living animals by ingenious and economical techniques such as tissue culture, the use of models, computers and bacteria. FRAME also produces a scientifically acceptable Journal of Abstracts on Alternatives to Laboratory Animals, and makes a welcome change from the usual tirade of bigotry.

Even FRAME forgets, however, that the medical student has an overriding need to observe and handle living tissue. When he measures nerve and muscle reaction and circulation in the economical frog, he is learning respect for the life process, and how not to be squeamish. When he keeps an anaesthetised rabbit alive for long enough to complete his routine experiments, he is practising for the day when he will be faced with the blocked airway of a collapsed newborn infant.

The mammal is a complex, dynamic, integrated organism with a feedback circuitry to preserve what Claud Bernard referred to as the constancy of the internal environment. Factors, as yet unknown, cannot be programmed into a computer and it follows that animals will always be needed until there is no mere to be learnt about health, or disease. To follow the course and speed of a nerve impulse from a stimulus on one paw of a cat, through nuclei in the central nervous system, and then to record the resultant spread of impulses from the grey matter of the cortex, or to observe how an impulse, initiated at one paw, alters the timing of another impulse initiated in another paw, there is no doubt but that a real cat is needed. A model will not do.

Every diabetic under treatment owes his life to countless, whole, live mammals sacrificed for research. The elucidation of the complex syndrome of diabetes itself depended upon a long series of macabre crossed circulation studies. These, not unreasonably, horrify the anti-vivisectionist. Crossed circulation may well be the only way of detecting the effect of trace quantities of an unknown substance circulating in the blood. Organs are isolated, in turn, from a dog deliberately made diabetic by an injection of alloxan. These organs are linked into the blood flow of a healthy animal where their effect can be studied without the complicating presence of other diseased organs. The gory details of this type of work are often printed without explanation, to make nauseating reading in the anti-vivisection leaflets. But how many antivivisectionists have no diabetic, friend or relative alive today? Every aspect of medical knowledge, skill and care is demonstrably, equally dependent in major part on animal sacrifice. But so is much else. When female rats give birth to litters of monstrously deformed young, having themselves eaten cabbage dusted With a new insecticide, that product does not reach the open market. So it is with cosmetics, fertilisers, food preservatives, and a whole variety of other goods, quite apart from every medicine Prescribed, or purchased over the counter.

Those of us who saw the BBC1 television documentary on October 23 will have reflected that widespread, lethal, kidney damage caused by abuse of the common analgesic, phenacetin, could have been avoided by sufficiently rigorous study on animals. By all means let us be humane, but never to the extent that humans suffer instead of other species.

It should be possible to reach some commonsense compromise. In the anti-vivisection's camp, FRAME must lead the way by admitting, frankly and unequivocally, that some animal sacrifice will continue to be inevitable and by openly acknowledging the value of this work' tci mankind. The RSPCA must regain credulity by an equally positive, responsible realignment, even at the risk of alienating its extremists. It will then be open to the Government to make grants available to further the type of replacement that FRAME envisages.

It should also be possible for the Government to introduce regulations by way of amendment of the 1876 Act widening the scope of its inspectorate and encouraging research establishments to be

more forthcoming. There is no intrinsic reason why a small inspection team should not be attached to each of the new Regional Health Boards, at some level at Which Public Health Officers and veterinary officers could cooperate. Unrest would be allayed. The Government should also Publish a more realistic statistical analysis of animals used. The Present figures only serve to tease those who fear the worst.

But for the diehard and unconvincible third group of an' ti-vivisectionists, however, the Way will remain hard indeed. To remain in perfect good faith she must deny herself, her children, and her pets all the benefits of animal research. She must forego all medical and veterinary aid and be prepared to let her child B develop meningitis and die, or recover to become a fumbly moron. When she herself gets her first warning of a postmenopausal bleed, she must resolutely take no action, and die quietly, in unrelieved pain, riddled with the inevitable purulent and putrid cancer. To shake tins on street corners with a picture of poor vivisected doggy, and then to pop into a pharmacy for a packet of aspirin to relieve a headache, would be an act of hypocrisy.