Despite all SHAC's rage, there are still loads of rats in a cage

Tucked away in the Business section of Sunday’s Observer was an 8-page supplement on the contentious issue of animal testing. It’s a pity that it wasn't in a part of the newspaper that more people read, though the fact that it was in that section did give me a clue to where the publishers might be coming from.

In the best traditions of liberal journalism, the section strove to give coverage to all viewpoints on the issue. I’m sceptical about the PR-speak of big companies at the best of times, and a piece in the wonderful Onion e-zine only accentuated this natural enough prejudice on my behalf.

The piece introducing the issues was so cliched that I could probably have written it myself. It’s the same sort of argument used by the likes of Monsanto: if it wasn't for their work, we wouldn't have cures for all sorts of diseases, thousands of people would live in horrible pain, etc.

Then in their piece on animal rights activists, who they refer to as the extremists, they suggest that some of the people involved might be as much motivated by a hatred of capitalism as much as by a love of animals. Judging by their tone and the section of the newspaper in which this piece was found I get the feeling that, strange as it may seem to me, they don't mean this as a compliment.

Yet the fact that groups like Huntington Life Sciences are businesses goes to the very core of why people are opposed to them. As a business their primary responsibility is not to sick people but to their own shareholders. A couple of years ago a saw a documentary on genetic modification where a Monsanto representative was claiming that their research was intended to help desperately sick people, the righteous indignation dripping from his lips like oil from one of their genetically modified sunflower seeds.

I’d love to believe that in spite of their massive wealth and influence, companies like Monsanto and Huntingdon Life Sciences were motivated primarily by altruism. But this is so patently not the case. Pharmaceutical companies have gone out of their way to stop countries in Africa and Asia from manufacturing their own generic anti-aids drugs, because they want to sell them their own drugs at massive profits. In turn they invest massively into researching mythical diseases like female impotence, which - Hey Presto! - they have the cure for. A fraction of the money which goes into this research could probably wipe out polio altogether - it only costs a mere 3 cents to immunise people against this disease, yet many in Africa and Asia still walk around on all fours like beasts.

But hey, we’re not all that different from beasts. Animal testers assure us that we’re quite like mice, and that’s an argument in favour of using them for research. But surely if mice are so like us, then they have the same capacity for pain.

Research into lab mice indicates that after prolonged use of MDMA their endorphin-secreting synapses burn out completely and they suffer a lifetime of depression afterwards. I suspect, though, that the mice weren’t popping E in the general cultural milieu in which the drug is consumed, so when they’re down in the dumps they won’t have happy memories of dancing on the Beach in Ibiza or Ko-Pha-Ngan to look back on. The revelation that mice can suffer depression is such a shocking one, though, that it should lead to a total cessation of experiments on mammals. Do the people who do these experiments ever consider how cruel it is to inflict a lifetime of depression on another animal? At least they probably save them the bother of committing suicide themselves.

And there’s been some progress made. Back in the 50’s the CIA were still testing LSD on people, with at least one human guineu pig throwing allegedly throwing himself out a window as a result. Now testing on great apes is banned, and organisations like HLC claim that they use cats and dogs only when really necessary, preferring to use rats and mice where possible. It’s interesting that the two species are in the same category, because while mice are cute animals that you could keep as pets, rats are the English football hooligans of the Animal world.

They go on to say that the average domestic cat will kill more rodents in an average year than any geeky scientist a white coat. This is what animal rights philosopher Tom Regan refers to as the Franklin Fallacy. Apparently Benjamin Franklin used to be a veggie until he was gutting some fish for a carnivorous friend and saw that the fish wasn't a vegetarian. It’s obviously a fallacious argument to say that because animals eat each other, we can eat them too, as we have the capacity to empathise with other animals and there’s only scant evidence that any other species has this capacity. It’s an argument that Samuel Butler made a hundred years earlier in his utopian satire Erewhon. In addition there’s an natural balance in the ecosystem that sustains a predator-prey relationship and this isn't the case in science labs.

I was amused to find that anti-testing “extremists” like Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) have actually caused more damage than the IRA over the last 30 years, though I doubt that any foreign parent company will ever refer to this phenomonon as “The English Problem” or that English middle-class pseudo-hippies will ever be routinely asked if they are animal rights extremists.

Though I have some sympathy with their cause, I think they have targeted the wrong organisations. The cruelty that goes on in industrial agriculture is actually far worse, both to animals and to the environment, and the animals that are it’s victims are generally higher up the evolutionary chain. I’d much prefer to see the meat aisles in Tesco’s being bombed, though as some of the activists mums are likely to be buying their Sunday Roast there, this is unlikely. But abattoirs, processing plants and trucks are all there for the molotov cocktailing. And when they do get what they want from the government, no-one will ever ask them to decommission their arsenal.