ve freedoms, then pointing to the benefits of research or agriculture will not do as a way of arguing, for example, that pain or behavioural restrictions are justified.
Current UK legislation, however, permits experiments that cause significant pain, providing the pain cannot be avoided and providing that this 'cost' to the animals is outweighed by the likely benefits to humans or other animals. Of course, many procedures routinely performed under the umbrella of scientific research, taking blood for example, involve very little pain.
But it's simply not the case that UK legislation protects animals from practices that do inflict pain or distress and there is nothing to protect animals from laboratory housing systems that impose behavioural restrictions.
Some research and some systems raise welfare issues which are very significant indeed because they clearly cause pain and suffering to the animals concerned. Granting animals rights would mean that in these cases research should not continue. And it would activate a range of constraints on the kinds of research that could be carried out in the future.
That difficult practical implications would follow doesn't, however, show that the animal rights argument is flawed. This is especially so considering that the parallel human rights argument is precisely what underlies our position with regard to humans and scientific research. In many cases, the best animal for research into human diseases is a human. But we're all clear that this doesn't justify using people in experiments that cause significant pain, that involve certain kinds of risks, or that severely curtail their ability to lead a quality existence. And we adhere to this, no matter how difficult the practical challenges of designing research that doesn't use human subjects or how much potentially life-saving information is forgone as a result.
In fact, all parties agree that the extent to which we use animals in research must at least be reduced. The UK government has recently announced plans for a new centre that will investigate and develop alternatives to animal research. This is good news. But the entire UK funding for developing alternatives to animal research of �660,000 per year (recently doubled by the Office for Science and Technology) is minute compared to that invested in the UK animal research industry itself, which currently uses 1.9 million animals. (9.8 million animals are used across the EU).
The dilemma in a nutshell
We are left with the reality that much research continues that is genuinely troubling from an ethical perspective, and that raises really tough questions about ways in which humans discriminate between members of their own species and those of others.
None of this is to deny that much animal research is of profound benefit to humans and often to other animals too. Though not all of it. It's important for all sides in this debate to distinguish between genuinely useful research and that which is badly designed or unnecessary. Under this category might go research that is designed to test drugs which have already been developed by market competitors; research that repeats work that has already been done; and research that is designed to test products deemed unnecessary to human health and welfare.
But this leaves unresolved the toughest of tough ethical questions that has emerged above. Are humans entitled to perform research on non-human animals in cases where the research would not be permitted if it were to employ human subjects in the same way? To put it another way, where we wouldn't use ourselves, are we entitled to use other sentient animals as research equipment?
Humans at the centre of the world
However this is finally answered, it's clear that the animal rights debate raises a profound set of questions about our relationship with the non-human world. We may laugh now at the outrageously human-centred attitudes of the past, wonderfully highlighted by Keith Thomas in
Man and the Natural World.
'Every animal was thus intended to serve some human purpose, if not practical, then moral