Abstract
The new legislation governing animal experimentation in Great Britain, the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, provides the opportunity, and in my view requires the Home Secretary, to ensure that trivial and questionable research is no longer performed on living animals in this country. It may be argued by some that such research was not in any event performed in the past under the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876. My purpose, therefore, in this essay is to provide illustrations of experiments undertaken within the past 10 years or so where the research can be considered to be either trivial, or morally or scientifically questionable, or where the degree of suffering imposed on the animals cannot be justified in relation to the purpose of the experiment.
‘Infliction of pain on an animal, then, amounts to cruelty when the pain is not compensated by the consequential good … The human good envisaged must be a serious and necessary good, not a frivolous or dispensable one, if the infliction of pain on animals is to be ethically acceptable.’
From the Home Office (1979) Report on the LD50 Test by the Advisory Committee on the administration of the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, para. 12
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© 1989 Clive Hollands
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Hollands, C. (1989). Trivial and Questionable Research on Animals. In: Langley, G. (eds) Animal Experimentation. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20376-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20376-5_6
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