Last weekend I received the following e-mail:
The website of Lab-Animal-Training offers courses that train people to “carry out procedures on animals” and to “kill animals,” activities referred to on your website as “EU Function A” and “EU Function D.”
You call this “laboratory animal science,” but it is, in reality, the business of animal suffering and death. You profit from training people to ignore the most basic ethical principles.
The e-mail was sent to a number of recipients. For some reason, I and a colleague in Switzerland were singled out as individuals among a list of mainly organisations. Given the content, I assume that we were all chosen as having a role in training scientists for doing experiments with animals. The functions referred to are the ones of Article 34 in Directive 2010/63/EU which is the legislation regulating the use of animals in research in the EU, and one of the many things the Directive covers is the requirement for training before doing any work that involves animals.
I totally understand that it is disturbing that there are training courses with the focus on killing animals, in particular when it is as explicit as the Directive is about that this is precisely what it is. I appreciate that the Directive is not using euphemisms here; we all need to be aware of that what we are doing when we are ending the life of an animal is to kill it. And it doesn’t qualify for the term euthanasia unless it would be in the animal’s own interest and this is only the case for terminally ill animals for which nothing else can be done.
But there is a weird assumption of cause and effect. People are not doing experiments on animals because they have taken our courses – they take our courses because they are doing experiments on animals and therefore need the training our courses provide. It is not as if we’re luring people into doing experiments on animals by organizing training courses.
Are we teaching people to ignore the most basic ethical principles? It seems easy to assume that not to kill and not to do harm is one of the most basic ethical principles, and I respect people who decide to live fully according to that idea. It of course means not to consume products of animal origins, and for consistency many also argue that it must mean not to use any medical treatment that has been developed using animals. It is very obvious that society in general, in most places of the world, is not based on an ethical principle of not killing and not harming any living being.
What we do teach is how to do experiments on animals causing the least possible harm and suffering to them. This is what I call the compromise position, the one that legislation is based on and therefore somehow the official position in our society, the European Union.
The profit, then? Whether you call it surplus or profit, when income is greater than expenditure, you have money left after paying all the expenses, and you can do things with that money. For not-for-profit organizations, which is the category in which most course organizers are found, this money is used for other important activities within the organization. In our case for research, since that is our “core business”.
Thanks to the funds generated through training courses in laboratory animal science, we are able to invest in research that we believe in without having to wait for successful funding applications. So far, we have been able to fund a one-year fellowship for a young animal welfare scientist to do research into the welfare of shelter dogs that are being trained by prison inmates.
Animalogues 