So HLS lose £300.000 and gets no money back because the counterpart declares itself bankrupt...The only victory here is for the campaigning group that has managed to take
£300.000 out of an animal testing company.

I am in favour of a massive expansion of animal testing in search of a cure for AIDS, cancer and other diseases. This should be funded by a ban on military spending.

This is the demand the Left should be raising. And please don’t waste my time with;

1) Explaining that most animal research NOW is not devoted to finding cures for human disease. Find someone that believes it is and convince them.

2) Fairly stories about “cell-cultures” being just as good to test on as animals.

 http://www.presscitizen.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050814/OPINION/508140301/1018/OPINION

Benefits of animal experiments no longer exist




Are we really saving lives?

Animal Liberation Front attacks on vivisection labs are difficult to characterize in terms of how effective they are in achieving their goals. Some would argue such tactics are more effective than given credit for, whereas most would acknowledge that such methods do more harm than good.

But what invariably gets lost in the subsequent emotional fray are questions regarding the usefulness of vivisection. ALF members have a core belief of animal rights that drives them to the extremes of ignoring laws and threatening researchers. But is the emotional aftermath of such action, scientists wailing loudly that cures might have been lost, really an adequate validation of vivisection? If a scientist truly wanted to illustrate the value and efficacy of the animal model, wouldn't the best defense be to show how scientifically valid and analogous such experimental models are to the human condition in question?

Throughout the public debate following the Spence Labs action, University of Iowa scientists offered no scientific evidence as to how the destruction of their work specifically hindered progress to human medicine. Broad, generalizing statements were made about how animal models were necessary and without them people would continue to die. Only this emotionally charged notion of loved ones dying too early was offered as reason for labeling such actions despicable.

This is part and parcel of the animal model. Vivisectors play the emotion card as a means of acquiring public support for their methods. If there's a chance to glean a cure for cancer from a thousand mice, would not the animals' pain and suffering be worth the sacrifice? Nearly all people would answer that their lives are worth such a sacrifice. But sacrificing even a billion mice will not identify a remedy for human cancer. Why not? What is wrong with vivisection as it relates to curing human disease? The answers lie partly in how vivisection began.

Claude Bernard is hailed as the father of modern medical experimentation. A French physiologist, Bernard sought to apply the rigors of chemistry and physics research to the field of human medicine. To open the doors to the innumerable secrets of human disease, Bernard pushed the physician into the research lab. From there, an investigator used his imagination for hypothesis formulation, but when it came to putting these ideas to the test, imagination was to remain at the door. If a hypothesis wasn't testable it was useless. This rigorous approach fit nicely with Bernard's advocacy of causal determinism. He believed that all events have causes and for numerically distinct but qualitatively identical systems, same cause gives same effect.

Bernard was not without morals. He insisted that using human beings for medical experimentation was profoundly unethical. So, he used what he deemed a qualitatively identical substitute: animals. For Bernard, an animal was the same as a human save for differences in scale. Animals had hearts, livers and kidneys and so on. It was obvious that they were made of the same things that we humans were. All a scientist needed to do was adjust for factors of scale (weight, surface area, volume) and causes applied to animals would elicit the same observed effects in humans. This sounds quite familiar to research proposals of today. Scientists are trying to figure out disease X with respect to this protein so they begin with a mouse that has been artificially induced with a variant of disease X while having the relative gene encoding the questionable protein knocked out for comparison with a wild-type animal.

The problem with using animals as causal analogical models is that the science of today is not the science of Bernard's time. To put it another way, an animal model might have had the resolving power to answer some, if not many, of Bernard's questions. But Bernard had no inkling of the dogma of molecular biology (DNA to RNA to protein), nor of gene regulatory networks that are different for every single living organism. Today we are mired with the complexities of unique individual proteomes, gene up and down regulation that can determine why one human twin can tolerate a certain pharmaceutical while the other human twin treats it as toxic. Bernard's causal determinism using animals as men writ small no longer applies.

Bernard went further by rejecting Darwin's theories of evolution, claiming such hypotheses weren't testable. Bernard, and, more specifically, the vivisectors that followed in his stead continued to ignore evolutionary biology and its implications to studying and elucidating causes of human disease. This trend continues today. Vivisectors assume that species differences are insignificant. Moreover, they do so without even attempting to control for the infinite number of variables that two differing gene regulatory networks necessarily possess. In a sense, the researchers of today have kept the lucrative aspects of Bernard's teachings (using animals for grants, publications and job security), yet have ignored his insistence of leaving imagination at the door and only accepting hypotheses that have passed the most critical scrutiny.

Before proclaiming that a mouse or a rat or a primate is a strong causal analogical model for a man, vivisectors should be required to prove as such with properly formulated and fastidiously tested hypotheses. Not unexpectedly, the animal model would not pass such scrutiny. The only other option is to never mention how disanalogous a particular animal is with respect to human disease. The only mention made is of loved ones, young ones, dying. These people will continue to die and diseases will remain unsolved until due attention is offered to non-animal based paradigms and the animal model becomes a relic of the past

Cure for AIDS? - Get Real
Cure for CANCER? - Get Real
Cure for ANYTHING by MURDERING ANIMALS? - Get Real

Let them VIVISECT on you 'SHITFACE' - See how you bloody like it. Tosser.

Hmmm... who should I listen to for their opinions on animal testing? The bulk of the scientific community or a load of animal right rabble? Real tough one...

Who honestly cares who you listen to Humpty Dumpty? Honestly, you have such a high opinion of yourself.

What a victory though, taking £300,000 away from people with no money? Perhaps they can pay in monopoly money. It's like taking an injunction out against the ALF... ohh, they did that too.

And I thought the anti-war crowd were a bunch of complete misguided prats, but then I read the Grim Dwarf (real identity is given away by the anagram "Mr Whig Farted").

I think it is YOU Mr Whig who needs to GET REAL & GET A LIFE waster. Lets face it, you're just another so-called activist who can't string together an argument without resorting to swearing.

I happen to have interviewed a number of animals on the subject of testing, and not one of them raised any objections! Of course, tesing on grim dwarfs would be much better.

So Fat Greg reckons he tells evryone to be asset free - yeah right - look at poor Lynn Sawyer (  http://www.vivisection.info/save6boatlane/ ).

Whilst Greg had the begging bowl out paying for his fat cat trendy Guardian reader lawyers in London, what happened to poor Lynn's legal advice ? After all she she has done for all the campaigns she was left out to hang dry, all so Fat Greg could have a martyr and deflect attention away from the state of the piss poor SHAC campaign.

Cambridge has gone, Oxford has stood still for over a year but HLS goes from strength to strength....whilst lovely Lynn gets sicker and sicker Greg gets fatter and fatter.

Everyone who has commented above , don't you see? The leaders have been corrupted. We are now in the realms of the professional paid direct action protestor.

F**K off and join the RSPCA fatso, scrounge off them till you pop, some of us are still at war against the animal abusing system and some of us care about our fellow activists and would not put her in a situation where she will loose her home.

Yes Smoking Beagle, you're absolutely correct there. The Grim Dwarf is a fine example of a typical animal rights activist - brainless and uneducated, just resort to the usual insults and intimidation when they can't get everything they want in life. There are the activists who try and put forward a coherant but still flawed argument to attract sentimental middle class twerps. They tend to have more than one brain cell to rub together, but deep down they're exactly the same as every other activist.

And as the Smoking Beagle was saying, if the animals objected to experimentation they'd have complained long ago!

As for the activists, they don't matter. As long as the terrorists are kept in prison where they belong, then their opinions are irrelevant.

Pissed Off Vegan Warrior or friend of Timothy Lawson Cruttendon? Your divide and rule tactics won't work here, as if anyone involved in the animal rights movement takes this board seriously. Does Lynn Sawyer know about your post? I reckon you've never even met the woman in yer life!

Here's a tip - if you want to make out that you're actually some animal rights activists, don't make school boy errors!

"As for the activists, they don't matter."

So why do you spend some much time beratting them then? It's like fucking dejavu mate, you've just plagarised my post!

Fact

An animal's response to a drug can be different to a human's but this does not mean animals are useless for testing drugs on.

Fact

Almost every medical treatment you use has been tested on animals.

Fact

Animal testing has helped to develop vaccines against rabies, polio, measles, mumps, rubella and TB. Operations on animals helped to develop organ transplant and open-heart surgery techniques.

Fact

Antibiotics, HIV drugs, insulin and cancer treatments rely on animal tests. Other testing methods such as cell cultures, statistics and computer models aren't advanced enough.

In the name of humanity I demand a massive extension of animal testing and research to be funded by a ban on military spending.

Listen to Dr Jarrod Bailey stating the case against animal experiments, without even mentioning animal rights.  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2005/08/320624.mp3

It's bad science. At best, it's a waste of money, and at worst it kills people when drugs which have been "proved" safe for humans by testing them on animals, turn out to produce nasty reactions in humans.

... because of their 'lack of heart & compassion' .. .. .
... Failing, miserable, uneducated sentiments from sectors of the so-called master race meant nothing here .. .. . . You Twerps! Get back to your BNP forums!

Dear 'Rogered Rabbit'

'Twerps' ! ouch !!

I have 'heart and compassion' but I also make use of that organ 'scarce' among the 'activist' community, the 'brain', and know that 'animal testing' is a worthwhile science for many many 'reasons'.

BNP - very far 'wide of the mark' !

Oh, and I try to 'look really clever' by putting lots of phrases in 'inverted commas' - but doesn't 'work' for me.