This article published Ubyssey Magazine 25th January 08. You can see responses from vivisectors by going to: http://www.ubyssey.ca/?p=2244

Peter Hamilton
Founding Director
Lifeforce Foundation
Phone: 604-649-5258
Email: lifeforcesociety@hotmail.com
Visit our Web Site: www.lifeforcefoundation.org

Cruel Intentions? Animal experimentation at UBC No Mr. hamster, I expect you to die!

Illustrations by Stephanie Findlay

Marc Serpa Francoeur
Friday, January 25th, 2008

Tucked away somewhere on south campus is the Animal Care Center (ACC), the current locus of animal experimentation at UBC. Unbeknownst to most students, UBC is one of the largest bio-medical campuses in the country. The ACC annually distributes some 100,000 creatures, both large and small, to dozens of UBC affiliated research projects.
Alternate Realities 10:57am,
UBC Animal Care Center 6199
South Campus Road

A fat, black sky weighs heavy as I roll through the barbed-wire perimeter of the ACC complex. A spate of “Restricted Access: Authorized Persons Only” signs welcome me, as a familiar odour, dark and caustic, creeps through the vent and welds to the back of my throat. I know that smell…but why?
I park near the rodent-breeding center, a drab, single-level concrete bunker. That foul smell grows stronger as I move toward the administrative wing of the complex.
Inside reception, flies buzz in the fetid air. The floor beneath my feet is sticky and streaked red. From somewhere in the labyrinthine halls before me, the drone of a large drill ricochets down the hall, nearly cloaking the muffled squeals of some wretched animal.
In the corner, the niece of Frau Blücher sits at her desk and gnaws on a chunk of strange, dark meat. Ah, yes… that would explain the smell.
With a feral twitch, she glances up at my entrance then screams over her shoulder in some brutish Teutonic vernacular. With the good Frau still a-bellow, a whistling attendant comes round a corner and breezes past with a dolly full of carcasses. Mangled, furry legs of a lesser ungulate protrude through a twisted mat of rigor-mortic albino mice.
The thick, blue arm of an ape hangs limply over the side, sticky crimson dripping from the thumb of its upturned paw. The director emerges from his office. He wears a bloodied butcher’s apron and pair of rigger boots well-worn in the toes.
“So, you’re the reporter, eh? Good, good…” He smiles and clamps a meaty hand down on my shoulder.
“Let’s show you around.” His fingernails are dirty…very dirty. I cough, then mention that I didn’t know there was a BBQ today.
“What? Oh, yes. Well, you must be hungry. Frau, let’s get this boy some meat.” And she scuttles off down the hall.
I ask if it’s a special occasion.
“Well,” he winks at me, “we do run on a lunar calendar.” I waggle my head knowingly and we join in a chuckle.
Good, I think. This is exactly what I expected.
Back to reality
Well, not so much.
Perhaps in the halcyon days of unfettered progress and unanaesthetized vivisection, such blithe environs could indeed be found in the noble corridors of academia. Surely in this great era of The Body Shop and vigilant watch groups, the macabre spectre of animal experimentation has withered like so many other embarrassing little pastimes.
Hasn’t it?
According to the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), the numbers of animals used in ‘science’ in Canada have increased significantly in the past decade, with over 2.5 million animals in 2006, up from less than 1.5 million in 1997. In fact, 2006 saw the highest number of animals used in research since 1975. As the home of a sizable and rapidly expanding industry of animal experimentation, UBC appears to be at the forefront of these trends.
“Depending on who you believe,” says Dr. Chris Harvey-Clark, UBC is “the second largest biomedical campus in Canada.” Harvey-Clark is the director of the university’s Animal Care Center, an institution currently responsible for the distribution annually of some 100,000 animals for use in dozens of UBC affiliated research projects.
Many students may be entirely unaware, but UBC maintains over thirty animal care facilities across its campus and throughout the rest of the city. With over thirty full-time staff at the centre, not including UBC Plant Ops staff, a sizable portion of the animals used are the product of the ACC’s extensive rodent breeding program.
Harvey-Clark describes a recent shift in Canadian research from the use of companion to farm animals, and from larger to smaller animals in general; a process he characterizes as the “refinement” of research practices. “Pigs are probably the main large animal that’s used,” says Harvey-Clark. “We haven’t seen dogs used in research at UBC since 1992.”
While the wide majority of the animals used each year are rats, mice, and fish, there are over 5000 subjects from other species, including larger mammals like sheep, pigs, rabbits, cats, and non-human primates. Harvey-Clark views the use of these animals in research as a “consumptive use,” and equates it to the use of animals in food production.
With a veterinary background, Harvey-Clark feels it his responsibility to maximize the welfare of the animals under his care. He purports with pride that ‘housing’ conditions for animals used in research have improved significantly at UBC over time and compare well with other facilities across the country.
That’s all good and well, one might think, but how have these developments affected the once sensational ethical concerns about animal experimentation? What of the great outcry of bygone years, as in 1981, when the very office occupied today by Director Harvey-Clark was firebombed by activists? While the housing for research animals might well have improved, has their welfare in terms of actual usage as experimental subjects changed drastically?
The Stats
According to the CCAC, experiments in Canada are divided into four different “Categories of Invasiveness,” In 2006, while about one third, or over 800,000 experiments caused “little or no discomfort or stress,” another third caused “moderate to severe distress or discomfort.” Additionally, over 7per cent, some 180,000 animals, were subjected to the highest level of invasiveness, “severe pain near, at, or above the pain tolerance threshold of unanaesthetized conscious animals.” This quantity is more than double proportionately, and well over three times in number than the mere 55,000 or 3per cent of animals used in this way in 1998, less than ten years earlier.
As far as the nature of the experiments, while some 30per cent were related to medical purposes in 2006, roughly 10per cent, some 238,000 animals were involved in the “regulatory testing” of non-medicinal products. While the number of animals consumed for this purpose has been relatively consistent over the past decade, the proportion subjected to the highest level of invasiveness has risen from less than 20per cent in 1998, for instance, to nearly 50per cent in 2006. All told, non-medicinal product testing represented well over 60per cent of the total number of animals subjected to the highest level of invasiveness in 2006.
While animal experimentation may receive less media attention today than in the past, not only is the consumption of animals in research at a thirty-year high, but both the quantity and proportion of highly invasive procedures show no sign of abating. These trends come at a time when the basic tenants of animal experimentation are, if anything, under greater scrutiny than ever before.
In light of modern technological developments, the basic justification of animal testing is increasingly dubious. According to Clive Perraton Mountford, a UBC professor of philosophy who specializes in environmental ethics, there is little continued rationalization for the use of animals in research in light of advances in “computer modeling and tissue culture work.” Surprisingly perhaps, these alternatives are typically far cheaper and faster than animal experimentation.
Not simply collateral damage
The use of animals in research is “hugely costly,” Harvey-Clark readily concedes. “It’s costly from a financial viewpoint, and it’s costly ethically; so, you have to be assured that their use is necessary.” Nonetheless, when asked about some of the successes achieved by animal research at UBC, Harvey-Clark, director of the ACC for three years now, had difficulty providing concrete examples. “It’s probably an example of how we don’t sell ourselves particularly well that I can’t give you a list of websites to go to.” When asked, UBC Public Relations failed to provide a listing of current UBC affiliated projects involving animal experimentation.
Motivated perhaps to considerable extent by corporate interests, a degree of redundancy is also present within the field of animal research. Dr. Alka Chandna, a senior Researcher at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) headquarters in Virginia, summarized some of the more controversial practices employed by UBC in the last few years. Among others, she described smoking experiments using guinea pigs despite, as she says, the ready availability of “plenty of information on the impact of cigarette smoke on humans through clinical studies.”
Most notable, perhaps, has been the continued use at UBC of non-human primates in neurological experiments. Recently, the rhesus macaque, an Asian species, has been used extensively in Parkinson’s disease research. The monkeys are typically subjected to brain damage which models the degenerative disease, and then treated with various methamphetamine and electroconvulsive shock therapies. Such usage of non-human primates in neurological experiments is an area that has received particular criticism from many in the scientific community.
Because of considerable anatomical and physiological differences, alternatives to animal testing can often provide more relevant findings in relation to human applications. In the words of Professor Mountford, there is “clear evidence that research findings in other creatures frequently do not translate into reliable knowledge about human responses to drugs and situations.”
Remarkably, the conservative and authoritative US National Research Council concluded in a 2007 report that due to the cost, time requirements and fundamental flaws in the translation of results, “over time, the need for traditional animal testing could be greatly reduced and possibly even eliminated.” It would appear then that perhaps the mainstream scientific community is coming to accept the desirability, at the very least, of a diminution of animal experimentation.
Back here at home
So where does this leave us? Have we reached the twilight hour of the age of animal experimentation? Apparently the UBC administration doesn’t think so. “We’re expanding quite rapidly now,” says Harvey-Clark.
“We’re about to open a very large 100,000 square foot centralized facility, north campus.” The director is referring to the Centre for Comparative Medicine which, according to UBC’s 2007-2008 Budget Summary Book, “will relocate and consolidate animal care facilities from south campus, as well as other locations around campus.” According to the BSB a $20 million budget has been approved thus far for the Centre. The number of staff at the ACC is already increasing in anticipation of the scope of the new facility.
If, considering the alternatives, the entire field of animal experimentation is increasingly redundant, ineffectual and costly, not to mention ethically ambiguous, why is UBC rapidly expanding its program? Professor Mountford wonders if it might be “an exercise in revenue generation” for the university. He may be correct, as an increasing proportion of the rats and mice bred at UBC are transgenic—animals which can easily carry a $1000 price tag. The priorities of the university, however, may be part of a larger trend that goes beyond the profitability of specialty rodents.
“We’re certainly in a period of wild success in research on this campus,” says Harvey-Clark. Whereas research is traditionally an area which loses money for universities, nowadays, the Director says, it’s turning a profit. In fact, UBC is at the forefront of this financial success. With a “research grant fund capture approaching half a billion dollars,” says Harvey-Clark “UBC is kind of leading the pack.”
As to the fate of the existing animal care facilities? “Well these buildings here, are sitting squarely in the middle of what you drove past on your way here, which is development,” says Harvey-Clark. Just past UBC Farm, the existing ACC is one of several facilities on south campus that will or have already been shut down and demolished to make way for the creation of infinitely more profitable enterprises like condo developments.
When asked about the future use of animals in research, Harvey-Clark spoke on behalf of his colleagues and stated that “all of us involved, would certainly like to see the replacement [of animals] where we can.” As far as specifically which areas of research such replacement might be likely to occur, the director responded that “it’s hard to pick an area where it’s more or less justifiable, really hard to put more value on one project than another.”
As a member of the Animal Care Committee, the very body responsible for the approval and monitoring of the use of animals in any UBC affiliated research, Harvey-Clark’s indecisiveness hardly provides assurances of discretion. Nor does the director instil the sense that UBC has any intention of curtailing its future use of animals in research.
And what does the UBC student body think of all this? Hard to say, as it seems unlikely that they’ve really been asked. It is worth noting that of all the student clubs and organizations at the University, not a single one is devoted to the issue of animal rights and welfare. A quick internet search shows UBC to be perhaps the only major university in Canada without one. Are UBC students unusually apathetic towards animal welfare? Is it possible rather, that under the clever subterfuge of an under-publicized ‘Animal Care Program,’ its activities have simply been well hidden enough to escape notice.
With the basic theoretical foundation for the use of animals in research crumbling, perhaps it’s time for the students of UBC to express their opinion of the annual ‘consumption’ of more than 100,000 animals by their university. For which purposes and to what ‘degree of invasiveness’ are we as a community comfortable subjecting animals to? And which species of animals, if any? Certainly the issue has never been more pertinent than at this juncture, as the investment of at least $20 million in a new facility will not only maintain UBC’s legacy of animal experimentation, but expand and extend it far into the future.