Normalising-the-Unthinkable-Report

in pain or how long they held their legs up because they were unable to put any weight on them. Blunt pins werealso pushed into their skin with increasing force until the sheep lifted up their legs in pain. Since the point of theexperiment was to assess pain reactions, there was no mention of pain relief during the tests, but there was nomention of pain relief afterwards either (Dolan et al., 2011). University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK.l. Eating disorders2.33. Researchers have used sheep as a model of human obesity. In one experiment they kept eighteen young(ten-month-old) female sheep on their own in individual pens. Under surgery, tubes were implanted into theirheads so that drugs could be delivered directly into their brains. Over the next forty weeks, some of the sheepwere then allowed to consume a high-calorie diet consisting of three times the normal amount of food required,while the others were fed a restricted diet for forty weeks. Members of the ‘obese group’ were then ‘put on a diet’and had their food restricted for sixteen weeks, while the others were given high-calorie food to fatten them upfor the remaining weeks. The sheep were subjected to regular anaesthesia so that their bodies could be scannedby a machine. They also had to undergo repeated blood-sample draws via cannulas in their jugulars as well asinsulin injections directly into their brains. At the end of this experiment, all of the sheep were killed, and their fatwas taken off their bodies and weighed (Adam et al., 2012). University of Aberdeen, Scotland.2.34. In an attempt to mimic anorexia, researchers fed mice severely restricted diets and encouraged them toexercise, leading to severe weight loss. Mice were kept on an increasingly restricted feeding schedule for threemonths until they were being given access to food for only two hours per day. Mice whose bodyweight droppedbelow 70 per cent of the normal bodyweight were killed. In one experiment, mice were kept in cages with runningwheels, where they were encouraged to exercise excessively. In another experiment, a chemical derived fromcannabis was injected into the animals daily to see whether it would increase their appetite. Some of the micehad to be killed due to the severe weight loss (Lewis and Brett, 2010). University of Strathclyde, Scotland, UK.2.35. Two conclusions can be drawn from these examples and from the numbers and uses worldwide. First, therange of uses to which animals are subjected is very wide, and second, all biological categories of animals areutilised. Almost all of these animals are sentient. Indeed, sentiency is a precondition of the need for a licence toexperiment under UK law and the current EU Directive. These sentient beings experience suffering, distress, harm,and death, as illustrated by the preceding examples.2.36. Since these experiments cause not only physical and/or psychological harm but also death, it follows thatthey require strong moral justification. We shall explore whether such justification is available to researchers, butfirst we shall look briefly at the history of the debate.3. The old debate3.1. Animal experimentation has been practised since the time of the Greeks, and possibly even before (Westacott,1949; Cohen and Loew, 1984). But it was only in the nineteenth century that experimentation began to be officiallyregulated through legislation. Since passage of the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 in the UK, there has been a long,and frequently acrimonious, debate between supporters and opponents of the practice. This old debate provideslessons for us and provides impetus for a new assessment. Numerous aspects of the old debate have effectivelyblocked progress in the discussion. Here we centre on four major aspects.Four blocks to ethical discussion3.2. The first block is nomenclature. The words ‘vivisection’ (meaning the practice of cutting an animal while alive)and ‘antivivisection’ (opposition to such a practice) became the standard terms of the pre- and post-1876 debate.In context, when the first uses of animals were preponderantly of this kind, the terms had some relevance.But the use of animals, as already shown, now widely exceeds such strictly invasive techniques. As such, soleconcentration on these outdated terms now obscures the nature of the debate, which encompasses a myriad offactors, including the antecedent conditions of actual use (capture, rearing, transport, handling, and conditions ofA Report by the Working Group of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics13