The silent suffering of cats and dogs 1

But these companion animals are the lucky ones.

There are thousands of cats and dogs who never have a loving home, never have toys to play with, never explore the garden or woods. They live in barren cages or pens, born to die as victims of science.

According to the latest government figures, around 10,000 experiments "likely to cause... pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm" are carried out on cats and dogs every year. The scientists' own published papers reveal that these animals suffer major damage to vital body systems, such as the heart, lung, brain and liver. They are surgically mutilated, infected with dangerous viruses and made to suffer convulsions, vomiting and other symptoms.

Supporters of vivisection often claim that animals in laboratories are well protected by the law. In fact, while undergoing experiments, the usual domestic anti-cruelty laws are not applicable. On the contrary, the legislation that controls vivisection sanctions the infliction of pain and suffering. It is the experimenters who are protected - from prosecution!

What is the nature of the experiments on cats and dogs? The animals are used to investigate a host of human afflictions, to see how the body works, and especially in the case of dogs, for drug and product testing. Some have even been employed in military research. Yet if similar treatment were meted out to the family cat or dog there would be outrage. This ambivalence is vividly illustrated by the well known Oxford experimenter Colin Blakemore who shared his home with a cat called Trevor. In the laboratory, however, Blakemore and his colleagues blinded numerous kittens for research into the visual system.

Victims of science

Despite being favourite companion animals, cats and dogs are forced into battle against some of our most serious ailments - even though there is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that they make hopelessly unreliable "models" of human beings.

Cats are used for research into stroke, whilst dogs are commonly employed to investigate heart disease; both are used for migraine research. Experimenters try to mimic human disease by artificially inducing the condition, or its consequences, in animals. So, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, cats were brain-damaged following a deliberately induced "stroke", produced by blocking arteries in the animal's head. Likewise, scientists at the University of Oxford produced "heart disease" in beagle dogs by tightening a wire around one of the coronary arteries.

Many of the experiments are commercially driven, being carried out by pharmaceutical firms to develop new drugs. In recently published examples, Glaxo-Wellcome used dogs to research yet another blood pressure pill, even though there are currently in excess of 60 available to doctors. SmithKline Beecham, Pfizer and Glaxo-Wellcome are in the lucrative migraine market, developing further drugs to combat headache. All have used dogs and, in the case of SmithKline Beecham, cats for the purpose. In other examples, companies have employed dogs to develop a heart drug (Pfizer), a cholesterol-lowering treatment (SmithKline Beecham) and an anti-thrombosis drug (Zeneca).

Analysis shows that most new drugs offer no therapeutic improvement over existing products, and are introduced for commercial reasons.

Beagles at War

During the 1980s, the government's centre for chemical and biological warfare, Porton Down, revealed that beagle dogs were being used in cyanide poison tests. A decade later, beagles were employed to develop a new sensory irritant called I-MCHT, whose effects are similar to those of CS and CN (tear) gas. At higher doses, the dogs suffered incoordination, convulsions, trembling, hyperactivity and rapid involuntary movement of the eyeballs.

Dogs are also used for testing non-medical substances. During the 1990s, thousands of beagles have been used to test the safety of agricultural chemicals, industrial substances, food additives and household products. These experiments are carried out by chemical companies and contract research laboratories. Product testing, together with the safety assessment of new drugs, account for most of the experiments (68 per cent) on dogs.

The other major use of these animals, especially cats, is in physiological research - to investigate how the body works. One technique employed by physiologists is to damage or interfere with a part of the body and then observe the resulting effects. Usually dubbed "fundamental biological research" because they don't necessarily claim any practical application, such experiments are often motivated by scientific curiosity, and account for much of the work done on cats.

A popular subject for physiologists is the cat's nervous system. For instance, at the University of Wales in Cardiff, cats (and rats) were used for research into nerve cells from a part of the brain called the thalamus. To obtain brain tissue, the rats were decapitated. In the case of cats, they were anaesthetised, the skull surgically opened and the membranes lining the inside of the head removed. They were then killed, the optic nerve severed and the brain removed to obtain the nerve cells for experiment. In another example, cats were subjected to spinal cord damage at the University of Cambridge to investigate nerve pathways.

Another favourite area for physiologists is the cat's visual system and, historically, many animals have been blinded to investigate the visual cortex. A 5-year survey of scientific journals during the 1980s revealed 156 published papers on "sight deprivation" in the world's laboratories.

Silent suffering

Around half of the experiments on cats use anaesthetics at some stage and many of these animals are "fortunate" in that they are killed at the end of the procedure before the anaesthetic wears off - unless, that is, the experimenter has made a mistake with the anaesthetic and the animal feels everything. Such errors are never mentioned in scientific reports or government statistics, yet just as in human therapeutic surgery, they must occur; the difference is that people often live to tell the tale.

Some experiments use no anaesthetic and there is no doubt that animals suffer. In a long series of tests at the University of Glasgow, cats have been deliberately infected with feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) to investigate its effects. FIV produces an AIDS-like disease and is seen by some scientists as an "animal model" of HIV. It should be stressed, however, that FIV only harms its host species - cats - just as HIV is only pathogenic for human beings. In the Glasgow experiments, FIV has produced fever, conjunctivitis and inflammation of the eye, with one report describing how a cat developed "profound anorexia", weight loss, stomach pain and jaundice. It was killed on "humane grounds".

In contrast to the situation with cats, most experiments on dogs are conducted without any anaesthetics. Dogs are most commonly employed for toxicity tests which rarely use any form of pain relief. This is because experiments can last for weeks or months and, in any case, an anaesthetic may interfere with the test substance, so making it even more difficult to make the data relevant to people. Although the findings from safety tests are usually kept secret for commercial reasons, the UK's Centre for Medicines Research has compiled information from industry sources which list symptoms and injuries experienced by dogs during drug trials. These included vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions, shivering, anorexia and hyper-excitement; plus eye, liver, kidney, heart and lung damage, and of course death.

It is not only during the experiment that animals may suffer. In March 1997 the Channel 4 television documentary Countryside Undercover revealed how two technicians at Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) had punched and violently shaken beagle dogs used for experiment. HLS is Europe's largest contract research laboratory and uses dogs and other animals to test products on behalf of clients.