It is not just a question of cosmetics, or medicines or pesticides. The predictable safety of your life, no matter what you do or where you do it, is built upon a foundation of animal sacrifice.
We cheat ourselves by imagining that we are not a part of it, or that we have a simple right of abstention. Our health, our nourishment, our warmth, comfort and peace of mind are the eternal debts we owe to rabbit, mouse, beagle and rat. Only by eating grass and living naked on a mountaintop could you manage to escape the benefits of animal experimentation.
There are good, principled arguments in favour of animal experimentation, and good, principled arguments against it. In the middle, where the debate is at its hottest, is a muddle of prejudice, misinformation and innocent hypocrisy which, at its worst, persuades gullible young people to arson, and at best puts misguided faith in emotional panaceas. Vegetarianism and "cruelty-free" cosmetics have soothing properties when applied to human guilt, but have yet to offer much consolation to the laboratory rat.
Prejudice exerts itself in a number of ways. First, there is a widespread conviction that it is somehow "worse" for an animal to die in the service of science or industry than it is to die for the deep freeze. But compare the figures: in 1988, a total of 3.5 million animals died as a result of laboratory procedures - but 500 million died in the slaughterhouse. Many principled and intellectually honest animal rights campaigners are logically consistent in their opposition to both kinds of exploitation, but many more are not.
Public opinion is coloured by a lurid mental picture of Frankenstein's kitchens where half-mad vivisectionists with Ruritanian accents stitch the heads of monkeys on to the bodies of toads. This is as false in its way as the pictures of dewfresh cottagey bliss stamped on cartons of battery eggs. With few exceptions, the conditions in which laboratory animals are kept, and the means by which they are put to death, are in every way more sophisticated and humane than those imposed on all intensively-reared farm animals and on very many pets. This doesn't excuse or justify anything, but it does make a necessary adjustment to the moral landscape.
Selective concern is also apparent in the way people view different laboratory species. Not much public pressure has ever been brought to bear in defence of the mouse or rat, but a huge outcry will follow the disclosure of any procedure carried out on dogs or cats. Approximately 13,000 dogs, mostly beagles, are used every year in British laboratories. Approximately 1,000 unwanted pet dogs are destroyed every day by the RSPCA and others. Again, the mental and moral failures of the pet-owning public cannot be used as a justification for anything that happens in a laboratory; but it does no harm to keep an informed sense of proportion.
It is also necessary to remember that not all the pressure for animal testing comes from the companies involved in it. Animal programmes are both costly and time-consuming, and companies have little appetite for avoidable expense. The truth is that most of the pressure is applied on the public's behalf by governments and consumer groups who demand that every product to which you, or your children, might be exposed has first been safety tested on animals.
"If we want safe products," says the Consumers' Association, "then that involves the use of the best available technology, and at the moment that seems to involve the use of animals. It's a matter of concern but a fact of life, unfortunately."
And there is another paradox, which in different ways creates its difficulties for experimenters and welfare campaigners alike. Potentially the most damaging condition reduced by animal experimentation is human ignorance. Without it, we should know less about ourselves than the Ancient Greeks, whose most famous physiologist, Galen, is a likely candidate as history's first vivisectionist. To him we owe the discovery that living arteries contain blood and not air - an observation made possible only by the insertion of a blade into live animal tissue. It was the first cut among billions. The circulation of the blood, the function of the nervous system, the skeleton, the brain: everything we know about the physiology of the human body is a product of the knife, applied to the living body of an animal.
The vast body of knowledge which results is nothing less than the defining factor of modern life. To take one example among thousands: without animal experimentation there could have been no understanding or conquest of epidemic disease. Without the conquest of epidemic disease, there could be no safe modern international communication. Without modern communication there could be no modern life. The 20th century would still be waiting to happen.
The paradox is that this tremendous legacy of gain gives the experimenter an easy debating point: Look what experimentation can achieve. Yet at the same time it supplies an argument to those who oppose him: The experiments themselves have proved that animals suffer. The evidence is clear. The suffering must stop.
Where, then is the common ground? It exists in what the welfare campaigners like to call the 3Rs - Reduction, Replacement and Refinement.
Reduction means looking for ways to reduce both the overall numbers of experiments and the numbers of animals involved in them. The principal target is one of the most controversial procedures in common use - the notorious LD50 toxicity test. This is a mathematically sophisticated but clinically crude method of giving a standardised toxicity rating to a drug or chemical, which involves calculating the single dose-level which will kill half the animals in a test group. In practice this does not mean that half the animals have to be poisoned to death, but enough of them have to die for the 50 per cent level to be reliably calculated. A "classical" LD50 test would typically involve 100 animals each of two different species (usually rat and mouse), all of which could be expected to suffer at least some effects of poisoning. These are unavoidably and undeniably distressing, and might range from simple nausea to internal bleeding, liver and kidney failure.
In many cases now, the classical LD50 can be replaced by a modified test, involving fewer than 20 animals, in which the predicted lethal dose is calculated from the point at which the first toxic effects appear. Thus it is enough that a mouse starts to vomit, or develops stiffness in its limbs, for the researcher to have all the data needed to make calculations. The dose does not have to continue until the animal dies. In pharmaceutical testing, the only necessary exceptions to this are the kinds of drug (such as those used in chemotherapy) in which the margins between the therapeutic and lethal doses are small and the toxicity levels have to be very narrowly defined.
In Britain in 1987, 111,313 animals were used in classical LD50 tests. British law does not now demand classical LD50s for most pharmaceutical products, though they are still required for pesticides and other agricultural poisons. Welfare pressure-groups such as the RSPCA and FRAME (Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments) are busily campaigning for an end to all LD50s both in this country and abroad, where some governments (most notably the Japanese) still require them for internationally-marketed drugs. But if it is the LD50 which inspires the bombers and grabs the headlines, it is a rather more mundane idea which, in the long run, is likely to save the greater number of animal lives. This is simply the common sense philosophy of good housekeeping of reducing both economic and animal waste by eliminating all unnecessary duplication of tests, while making the widest possible use of existing data.
The most commonly quoted example of this is "cruelty-free" cosmetics, though "cruelty-reduced" might be a less misleading way of describing them. There is no guarantee that the active ingredients or colourings in a cosmetic or other bathroom product have never been tested on animals (the truth is that almost all of them have), on behalf of either the consumer or the workers involved in their manufacture. The point is that the makers are taking advantage of known test results, and not calling for any more. In the overwhelming number of cases, the most you can realistically expect is that there will have been no testing of a product for a minimum of five years. This is a genuine improvement over the gung-ho years of Draize-test-for-everything, but - alas for total moral hygiene - the "cruelty free" label does not mean that a shampoo has never been dripped into the eyes of a rabbit, a toothpaste has never been forced fed to a rat, of a sunscreen has never been rubbed into the shaven skin of a mouse.
The second of the 3Rs, Replacement means looking for non-animal alternatives to established laboratory tests. The commonest example of this is the ordinary hospital (or, increasingly, home) pregnancy test, which nowadays is a straight forward bit of GCSE-standard, test-tube chemistry. When the first pregnancy test was introduced in 1927, the doctor had to inject his patient's urine into the body of a live toad and watch to see if it ovulated. Sixty years of progress have been good for mothers, good for doctors, best of all for toads. They have also lent clamour, if not always weight, to the arguments of those who like to believe that every known animal procedure could similarly be replaced with a bit of bench-top wizardry.
But, as the RSPCA acknowledges, there is still no short-term hope of in vitro alternatives in a broad range of medical research areas. The only alternative to animal experimentation in, for example, multiple sclerosis, kidney failure, epilepsy and rheunatoid arthritis is either to switch the work to human subjects or to do no research at all. This is indeed the solution which abolitionists like the National Anti-Vivisection Society would urge, but it is not one to which the more pragmatic welfare groups, including the RSPCA and FRAME, can afford to pin their colours. Their real hope lies in the fact that there is nearly always a point at which scientific interests and animal welfare interests converge. No scientist wants to do more live animal testing than he has to. If he can find cheaper, quicker, more efficient non-animal alternatives, then he is very likely to use them.
Two of the best examples of this have been the AMES test, which uses bacteria instead of live mice in the early screening of chemicals for carcinogenicity, and the Wellcome Foundation's work on insulin. In 1922, when insulin was discovered as a treatment for diabetes, the purity of each batch was tested by injection into mice. The procedure required 600 animals per batch, with dose-levels high enough to cause convulsions. By the late Seventies, better production methods and a new blood glucose test meant that the same quantity of insulin could be tested by injecting only 130 mice with much lower, non-convulsive doses. To put it another way, 20 years ago it would have needed 20 mice to "assay" enough insulin to treat one human diabetic patient for a lifetime. Now it requires only one mouse, and very soon, thanks to a new method of chemical analysis, it is more than likely not to require any mouse at all.
Wellcome's version of a new method of chemical analysis, high-performance liquid chromatography, has been successfully tested in a number of European countries. It now awaits recognition by the British and European Pharmacopoeia as the official, internationally accepted method - a process of ratification which usually takes one or two years. Thus a gradual programme of reduction will have resulted eventually in the complete replacement of an animal procedure.
Such is the fear of attack from radical animal-liberation groups that not all companies are as open as the Wellcome Foundation even in acknowledging their successes. One eminent British company, for example, declined initially to take any public credit for its research department's achievement in winning a major international prize for an in vitro method of testing the effects of drugs on unborn children. It is not an atmosphere in which informed debate is made easy - a particular irony, given the importance of education in promoting non-animal techniques.
The educators themselves have worked hard to put their own house in order. Gone are the days - not so long ago - when pet cats near a medical school or teaching hospital walked in peril. No longer does the biology class have to see a "live" dissection of an anaesthetised or freshly killed frog, rabbit or dogfish: an endlessly repeatable video programme does the job much more effectively, with a single recorded dissection serving the needs of many generations of students. Computer simulations and rubber-and-plastic anatomical models have further reduced the need for live or specially killed animals in the classroom or lecture theatre - a development which will do more than any fire-bomb to banish from the educational curriculum any idea that animal life is cheap.
The last of the 3Rs is Refinement. The reasoning accepts that animal experimentation will continue, but calls for laboratory procedures to be made as stress- and pain-free as possible. The result, in the best laboratories is operating theatres with life-support and monitoring systems that would do credit to the NHS. As always, the humanitarian argument is reinforced by an economic one. As in a human hospital, theatre time is expensive: each tiny patient therefore represents an investment which has to be protected. If an animal being used in an experiment develops infection or other side-effects of bad clinical practice, then the experiment will be ruined. Proper anaesthetics (not ether) are now the norm, and post-operative analgesics are increasingly given to aid painless recovery. This is an important advance: even 10 years ago, an animal experimenter who worried about post-operative pain would have been thought soft in the head.
Refinement also means reducing the scale of surgical or physiological invasion. Until recently, for example, a surgical experiment to test the regenerative capacity of damaged nerve tissues involved severing the nerves to a rat's entire hind leg, effectively crippling it. A refined technique involves cutting only the nerve to a single toe, leaving the animal's range of movement unimpaired.
A much more controversial example concerns the implantation of tumours in mice. The justification for doing this is the same as it is whenever an animal is deliberately made ill: a scientist can't study a disease, or test a potential cure, without first giving the disease to an animal. Your acceptance or rejection of this argument will depend on which side of the animal rights fence you stand. But even for those who accept it, cancer is a special case - a point recognised by the UK Co-ordinating Committee on Cancer Research, which has published very clear guidelines designed to limit suffering.
One advantage afforded to mice but generally denied to human sufferers is the right of euthanasia. Unless there is some powerfully persuasive reason to the contrary (specifically to study the terminal stage of the disease, for example), animals are to be humanely destroyed before the tumour kills them. There are guidelines on the siting of tumours (ideally on the animal's shoulder blade or back, where they will not interfere too badly with its movements) and on their size, which should not exceed 10 per cent of the animal's body weight.
In the RSPCA's view, this is still too high. A 3g tumour in a 30g mouse, it points out, is the equivalent of a 15lb tumour in an 11-stone human. It also objects to the degree of weight-loss permitted in tumour-bearing animals: 20 per cent in most instances, but as much as 40 per cent in special cases. On the human scale, this is like a 10-stone man dropping to 6 stone - an objection which in the researchers' terms, is part of its own defence. If this is what happens to humans, then - for the sake of accuracy in the study - it is what must be made to happen to mice. It may be ugly, distressing and painful; but that is precisely why the need for study is so vital.
Urgent human need versus animal rights. One moral imperative in collision with another. It is more like a cheesewire than a tightrope upon which the welfare groups have to walk, and one cannot envy them their dilemma. If they lean too far towards the scientists (and too far in some minds means anything that falls short of outright condemnation), then they are vilified as puppets of the industry (a particular hazard for FRAME, which accepts drug company funding). If they lean the other way, then they are accused of placing a mouse's life above a child's. Accusations of Nazism come along with monotonous frequency.
The accusations become yet more venomous, and the dilemma still more acute, when the refinement involves genetic engineering. In the United States, Harvard University has patented its very own strain of cancer-carrying transgenic mice guaranteed to develop cancer within 90 days of birth, and the American drug firm Du Pont is planning to market them. The refinement is that the mice are spared one surgical procedure - the implantation of the tumour. But you do not have to be a moral philosopher to see the problems here. Is our power over other species so absolute that anyone could ever have the right to patent a form of animal life? And could the suffering of every single individual in every single batch of born-to-be-ill animals always be justified? If not, then it could be argued that any plan to sell such animals in this country would fall foul of English law.
Perhaps the most important kind of refinement builds on a point which welfare campaigners (though not the RSPCA) surprisingly often overlook. Laboratory animals spend very little of their time being experimented upon. Ninety-five per cent of their lives is spent in the animal-house, where their needs are exactly the same as those of any other captive animals. The arguments in favour of behavioural enrichment, proper feeding, housing and social contact apply just as much to laboratory animals as they do to polar bear and battery hen.
In return for an agreement not to reveal its name or location, The Sunday Times Magazine was given access to one of this country's largest animal research departments, in which experimental work is carried out on mice, rats, guinea-pigs, rabbits, cats and beagles. The veterinary scientist in charge is a leading campaigner for improved standards both of clinical practice and animal care and is an influential adviser to the RSPCA. Despite his proven record as an improver of animal-welfare standards, his name cannot be revealed on the advice of the police.
He does not, as he has been told to, look underneath his car before he drives home every night, but otherwise security around the building is tight. The animal-house is not named among the list of departments on the board outside; there is no direct access to the laboratory by lift from the ground floor, and all the doors - even the internal ones - are controlled by combination locks.
Inside, there is a faint zoo smell - a combination of dung, food and straw - but the immediate and lasting impression is of exemplary hygiene and order. Young, blue-suited technicians - mostly women - glide around with the quiet efficiency of nurses, doing much the same kind of work: feeding, cleaning, cajoling, changing dressings. Like a consultant on his rounds, the senior scientist ticks one of them off for failing to record in the notes that a rabbit had got its tail trapped in a door and needed a stitch.
There are thousands of animals here, tier upon tier of mice, rats and rabbits. Except for those which have to be isolated for strictly clinical reasons (or occasionally because of a tendency to fight), many of the animals are kept in social groupings with better than minimum space to move and stretch. The huge white rabbits, aggressive and difficult to handle, are generally housed separately but - like all the other animals - have better, cleaner living space than most of their pet-shop cousins, and suffer none of the acute deprivations of the intensive farm. The living units are rather like large Tupperware boxes with piped water supply - characterless but roomy and easy to keep clean.
In one room an experiment is being conducted to determine the practicability of keeping rabbits in large social groups. One of the problems is finding a means of telling the individuals apart, and the technicians are working hard on a familiarisation programme, just sitting with them for an hour a day to establish a bond.
For a visitor from outside, all this is thought-provoking but generally undisturbing. The small mammals are handled as carefully and with as much respect as one could hope to see from anyone this side of St Francis. One knows that they are going to die, but somehow one doesn't fear for them. In the cat and the dog houses, however, there is shock. It is not that they are in any way different from any other cats or dogs one has ever met, but rather that they are exactly the same.
The cats, a huge, multi-coloured mob in a large room of their own, come crowding round with their tails erect like a flotilla of yachts, butting and rubbing themselves against the human legs. The beagles, kept individually or in small groups with access to a large exercise yard, make immediate eye contact and jump up like beagles do, full of curiosity and friendship. It is this very amenableness, this ease of handling, that makes them such convenient laboratory subjects. A trust betrayed? Intellectually one knows that if one accepts a part of what happens here, then one must accept the whole. But emotionally, for reasons that are hard to disentangle but which one knows are part of the bedrock of one's British psyche, it is not so easy.
Several of these dogs are veterans of numerous transplant operations. They are the only animals in the unit that have names. One of them has even gone home with the senior scientist to become a house-pet. One suspects from this evidence that all of us, scientist and layman alike, are accomplices in a conspiracy of silent unease. The bad feeling is obvious. The good feeling is by way of consolation: if such work has to be done, then these are the right people to be doing it.
For no matter how badly one wants not to convict oneself of speciesism, of making morally inept distinctioris between one animal and another, in the end one has to admit that one cannot avoid it. And neither, in their way, can either science or the law. Both make distinctions - sometimes implied, sometimes explicit - between "lower" and "higher" orders of mammal, in a way which, in effect, imposes a greater duty of care the closer a species gets to man. If the Home Office demands a good reason to licence an experiment on a rat, then it will expect a better one for a beagle and a better one still for a chimpanzee.
Few things in the whole of science unleash such torrents of passion as experimentation on primates. For here is yet another paradox, another case of qualification and disqualification being exactly the same. For it is the primate's physiological closeness to homo sapiens that makes it the most scientifically suitable stand-in for man in the laboratory; and it is the very same human resemblance that makes the sight of it so appalling. Who can be unmoved by the thought of baboons being given epileptic fits, or rhesus monkeys Parkinson's disease or marmosets drug overdoses?
There is science as well as sentiment in the concern: the "higher" the animal, the greater its awareness of what is happening to it, the greater its capacity for mental suffering. Both the RSPCA and FRAME are dedicated to the cause of removing primates from the laboratory altogether, even though they know that in the short term this could only have the effect of throwing the experimental burden on to other species - most probably on to the beagle and other dogs.
Bryony Cobby, head of the RSPCA's Research Animals Department, sees an irreconcilable conflict of interest between scientist and animal: "Primates have more complex social and environmental needs than other animals. It is virtually impossible to create an environment that would satisfy both the needs of the research project and the needs of the primate. As a result, the needs of the primate are those that are compromised."
Such is the atmosphere of terror generated by the bomb-throwing fringe of the animal liberation movement that the primate laboratories have locked themselves away behind a high wall of secrecy. One by one, Britain's major drug companies declined our request to be allowed to see their establishments. Embarrassed press officers were forbidden by their managers even to let us speak to a scientist on the telephone. They would not be persuaded even by the guarantee of anonymity and the (unprecedented) offer to allow them to check what we wrote. The unavoidable impression was of shame, discomfiture and a determination to conceal. But to conceal what exactly? After all, we knew the names of the individual companies; we knew the addresses and the telephone numbers of their laboratories and we could, if we chose, simply publish them as a matter of record. All we were really being denied was the straightforward factual information about what was going on inside.
In the end, after we had given a written assurance that we would not identify it, and agreed not to take photographs, one company did agree to let us into its primate laboratory. At the site, both security and health precautions are tight. Entering the animal-house means gowning up like a surgeon: sterilised overalls, cap, face-mask and rubber boots, and a footbath of strong-smelling disinfectant between the outer and inner doors.
Inside, to the intense discomfort of human visitors, the air is kept at jungle levels of heat and humidity, with a clinging stench of monkey. There are three species, all caught and imported from the wild: tiny, squirrel-sized marmosets and squirrel monkeys from South America and larger cynomolgus monkeys from the Philippines. They are all comfortably, although not royally, housed in social groups, in cages large enough to permit some normal climbing and swinging behaviour, and with an opportunity to forage for their food. The cynomolgus monkeys have ropes and toys, and all three groups are entertained by radios tuned to non-stop pop.
This much cannot be denied: the animals are physically healthy with no sign of psychological disturbance; they are well-fed and expertly maintained by qualified technicians who genuinely care for them. It is also true, in the instance of this particular laboratory, that the experimental procedures are mild.
Typically, a monkey will be given a normal therapeutic dose of a drug, then supply blood and urine samples to monitor the rate of absorption into the blood stream. For the animal, it is no more disturbing than a routine course of veterinary treatment, and it survives to very nearly the end of its natural lifespan (some of the squirrel monkeys at this laboratory are over 10 years old).
Elsewhere, however, primates are involved in procedures with significantly higher levels of suffering: in toxicity studies, for example, and in "fundamental" studies involving experimental surgery - procedures which are high on the target list of those seeking reform.
"We should not," says Jacqueline Southee of FRAME, "base our view of the future on whether or not animal experiments have been useful in the past, but rather on whether they should be considered the most appropriate way of continuing biomedical research in the future. We must channel more resources into the development of reliable alternatives."
For the moment, however, this is the way the cost-benefit account must look. Animal suffering in return for human health. A huge gas-fired incinerator at the end of the corridor beyond the beagles. Safe lipstick, safe detergent, safe shampoo, safe surgery, a cure for whooping cough, better dental care, safe childbirth, a treatment for cancer. An emaciated mouse with a lump on its back. Non-toxic food colouring, suntan lotion. Three-and-a-half-million animals a year.
Everything you swallow.
Everything you wear.
Everything you touch.
It is a branch of accountancy which until now has defied all but the most simplistic kind of analysis, and has yet to receive the kind of concentrated study it deserves. This year the University of Birmingham inaugurates the first-ever chair of Biomedical Science and Ethics, and in so doing, will be for Professor David Morton one of the hottest seats in British science.
