Animal Research in the UK. Unmasking the fudge

Animal research in the UK is currently regulated by the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. 

We live in one of the few countries in the World where use of animals in research is controlled by Law and to work on and with animals requires UK government licences for the individual, the project and the Institution. 

As part of the provision of these licences, you are required to tell the Home Office how many procedures have been performed on animals each year.

This week the government published the annual statistics about how many animals were used in experiments in the UK in 2011. Read the papers. This is done every January and shock, horror, probe the numbers used has increased from 1987 with 3,500,000 to 3,800,000 animals in 2011. This is a 2% increase since 2010. 

These animals were used from “breeding genetically modified mice to mimicking neurological disease”. 


I know based on past surveys that if you think that animal use can benefit MS, you are for it but does the news this week mean that more animals have been used for the benefit of MS? I doubt it. 

Whilst the actual number may shock, as it does me, each of us non-vegetarians probably cause the death of a chicken a week. So 52 chickens per person per year, so even if half the UK don’t eat chicken it is about 156,000,000 chickens. So now add Pork, Beef, Lamb and Fish and we kill a lot of animals. Multiply this by the World and it all gets bigger.

There are about 30,000 genes in the human genome and there is a plan (big-science) to produce mice that lack each and every one of them. For a small colony of mice you need to keep at least 5 pairs just to keep things going, so that is 300,000 breeding mice. They make 5-10 offspring every 3 weeks so 3,000,000 every 3 weeks so that is 51,000,000 produced just to keep the colonies ticking over. Now they are not all located in the UK, but there are centres in the UK making these things. If you want to do work on say 50 female mice you need a lot more breeding pairs and can see how easy it is to produce a lot of mice and you can see how numbers can inflate. 

If the aim of statistics is to show a trend for reduction of animal use, the Home Office probably made a mistake by requiring that all genetically-engineered mice produced, are recorded as a statistic. This is where the majority of animal research heads and the use of transgenic animals has been rising year on year.

So why call it a mistake? Well this is because of the fudge that is done to mask the true situation. You record the use of the transgenic animal if you experiment on it, if just use it for tissues or if you are letting it breed naturally. However, if this was not a genetically-engineered animals things would be very different. If you do an experiment on it, the procedure is recorded but if you just use it for tissues etc. you do not record it and here there is a massive fudge and they are not recorded. This is because it is just like killing animals for food or having a pet that dies or you have it put down, so it is not an experiment on the living animal, which the law is there to protect. This is a fudge that keeps the numbers of animals used in experiments artificially low.

Now many of the transgenic animals are used to keep colonies going and the transgene inserted into the mouse during genetic engineering causes no apparent life-altering effects in animals. Yet their use must be recorded.  In addition to genetically-engineered animals, mutant animals must be recorded also. 


They are often called mutants because we can see things wrong with the animals such as they make no fur and a thymus = Nude mice. The NOD (non-obese diabetic) mouse develops type I-lie diabetes and the NZW x NZB hybrid mice, develop anti-DNA antibodies and a lupus-like disease. Wobbler mice wobble and Rumpshaker mice shake their booty so it is easy to tell that they are a mutant and are recorded on the statistics as mutants. 


However, many so called seemingly normal laboratory mice have mutations such that the BALB/c mouse is deaf, the C57BL/6 mouse prefers alcohol to water, the CBA mouse loses sight in two weeks and the SJL mouse loses sight 6 weeks after birth. These animals behave and breed normally and so are not classed as mutants and are not recorded on the statistics.  So if they were to maintain this fudge they could incorporate transgenic animals that have no discernible adverse phenotype and the numbers used in experiments would perhaps be reducing not increasing.

If there was no fudge at all, the real number of animals used for scientific and drug-related studies would be much higher. However, may be the total number of a animals used may be falling as you may be switching from rat studies to studies on transgenic mice. 

The number of rats used is dropping and the use of non-human primate (monkey) in research has halved with in the UK, which is good. However we can go better and say that nobody performs experimental MS-related studies in primates in the UK. The number of fish used is increasing as some of the tests on rats are replaced with using fish and other species. It is also the case that, many things go unreported and fruit flies and worms can be squashed at will, because they do not have a back bone


So what about rodents? If the Royal Society of the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) get their way, EAE will become a thing of the past.

According to the UK Home Office the severity of experiments is classed as scale as mild, moderate and substantial=severe and if you have an overall band of substantial on your Home Office licences your work is scrutinized by more Home Office Inspectors and you are subject to extra regulation and checks. At present 36% of procedures are classed as mild, 61% moderate and 2% are classed as severe and EAE fails into this latter category. The RSPCA want to end all severe animal research. This would mean an end to EAE studies in the UK. This could just mean that more and more studies will be done abroad, where there is less regulation. 

For example it was considered OK by a Japanese scientific group and American editors and referees to hang a mouse constantly by its tail for weeks, so it is was doing hand-stands for months. I would not even attempt to justify the ethics of this as the results would be, and were, in my opinion a load of meaningless pants as the animals would be too stressed.

If we are to accurately model progression, we are probably going to have more severe models to contend with. 


At Team G we do not shy from this challenge yet we do take the matter of Refinement, Reduction and Replacement (3Rs) of animal use in research seriously and have developed a alternative system that should indeed kill-off the ethical argument use to justify many EAE studies. However carrots are always better than sticks when it comes to change.

Furthermore, whilst on my high horse about the black hole of under reporting.  Some experiments do not need licences to undertake. This is what they term schedule 1 killing. It means you get the animal and humanely kill it and use the tissues for your research. This occurs in loads of neuroscience studies, such as stem cell research. This will account for thousands and of animals, which are not accounted for in the statistics. Furthermore the people doing this do not have to justify this use of animals and do the same training to the extent that people doing work on live animals must do. They should.


In the age of stem cells, it should be feasible to grow any cell type and so there can be no ethical argument why one does not do the experiments on human cells.....It is probably not done because this has ethical issues, not as much is known so it is tougher to do and because it is very, very expensive to buy the growth factors to make different types of cells. This area should be tightened up and a lot experiments would not get performed

The (UK) coalition government has pledged to reduce the use of animals in scientific research. Although they could be funding alternatives, they are doing their best to achieve this by cutting/freezing research budgets, making the tertiary educational system self-financing and driving industry from these shores.  At the moment big-pharma essentially do not do neuroscience research in this country. This is because it is too expensive and probably too regulated. 

Animal research is becoming a dying breed and the major driving force is probably not ethics but sadly economics. Doing animal work in universities is simply becoming too expensive, unless you are in a core funded centre doing the big science. 


However, for medical research you have the option to continue and have the chance to change people’s lives or you do nothing and live in an intellectual vacuum with limited prospect for change.

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