THE GOVERNMENT'S decision to ban cosmetics testing on animals is clearly most welcome. However, it must not be forgotten that cosmetics testing accounted for only 1,319 out of a total of 2.64 million animal experiments in 1997, many of which were unrelated to medical research. It is time to take an equally hard look at certain other categories of animal experiments.

Every time the government receives an application for a licence to experiment on animals it must, under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, weigh the likely animal suffering against the likely benefit of the research (the 'pain/benefit test'). Cosmetics tests were banned on the principle that such tests are too trivial to merit the infliction of suffering on animals. There are already enough cosmetics on the market. A ban on certain other tests such as those for household products and garden chemicals would appear to follow logically. Such tests can cause a great deal of suffering - the LD50 involves force-feeding groups of animals with different amounts of the test chemicals to determine the dose which kills half of them.

The BUAV would go further and ban all animal experiments, as we believe that the deliberate infliction of pain on animals is morally wrong. As the next step, however, we believe the government should outlaw the huge number of tests which have much more to do with commercial interests than any desire to alleviate human suffering.

Christine Orr

British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection

Crane Grove, London

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Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.