The Downing Site was mobbed by a group of Animal Rights protesters last Friday.
Members of the group, aligned with the Week of Action against University Vivisection, took up stations around the site and the police had to be called to get them to leave.
The protests were in response to an undercover report by the past British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection into the practices of some Cambridge labs which claimed that marmoset experiments conducted at the site amounted to animal abuse and creulty.
BUAV secretly filmed 400-500 marmoset monkeys imprisoned in small cages to be used as human models for basic and applied brain research. The group claimed that the monkeys were deliberately brain damaged .
Campaigners shouted to the few students and tourists present that “these painful, cruel tests and barren sterile animal housing that cause animals to literally go mad belong firmly in the past”
The group told The Tab "Scientists have shown that drugs tested on animals aren't accurate enough to be used for humans anyway.
"Micro dosing, DNA chips and computer modelling is the future"
They urged Cambridge to immediately divert all vivisection funds to these cutting-edge technologies.
A University spokeman however claimed “Good science and good animal welfare go hand in hand… [we] work to the highest possible standards of animal care.”
Cambridge has been known in the past to ignore the claims of protesters.
In the end, the protestors’ nefarious activities, including but not limited to “holding posters, giving out leaflets and speaking on megaphones” caught the watchful eye of University Security, who told The Tab that “peaceful protest” was all well and good, but not when “university business” is disrupted.
These protesters are right, the labs can be so creul!
The UK has basically the strictest animal welfare regulations on science in the world. Do you really think that scientists would cause intentional harm (not to mention undergo the vast expense and hassle involved in animal work, or the risk to oneself/one's family from these protestors' more violent cousins) if it was not the only way to discover what we need to advance the knowledge that is the basis of lifesaving medical technology for both humans and animals?
Anyone who thinks that animal experimentation can be abandoned and totally replaced by "micro dosing, DNA chips and computer modelling" doesn't have a clue what they're talking about.
creulla de vil, creulla de vil, if she doesn't scare you, no evil thing will
This idiot "philosophy" finds its natural conclusion in the environmentalists who believe that animals, even insects, are as valuable, or even more valuable than humans (being guiltless little things, unlike our rapacious, grasping species). Ah well, such is the topsy turvy world of fashionable relativism.
… except, such views have damaging consequences. A misanthropic standpoint may seem harmless, but modern misanthropy has a truly nasty edge to it. Crucially, Jonathan Swift didn't actually advocate the eating of Irish babies. But it doesn't look like that would be too much of a leap for many environmentalists: what's human life worth, we're just a stain on the face of Gaia. But wait, Swift "advocated" the use of babies as sustenance to help relieve the suffering of the poor! I'm not sure our environmentalist friends would be too keen on keeping the poor alive. Those people feckless, stooooooopid, and SELFISH enough to breed. How dare they? In earlier times the poor were morally suspect. Now, to Zac Goldsmith and co, they're 'irresponsible'. Or is it that they don't live up to the moral standards imposed by green austerity? How dare those funny people in the developing world aspire to live like us!? Don't they know that civilization is a disease that's hurting the earth? (Heaven fordid that technology might actually provide a solution to global warming. Cower in fear from nuclear power, which could keep the lights on, GM food, which could feed the world's poor, and DDT, which should have wiped out Malaria in Africa years ago. Bow before the great Icelandic volcano! Gaia has pronounced her judgment! Worship the wind and the sunlight, and windmills and solar panels, with their ridiculous inefficiencies which mean no sane government will commit to them alone.)How irresponsible of them to aspire to live longer! It's alright for us, we're suffused with middle class, white guilt (or in the case of the most active environmentalist activists, aristocratic guilt). Some of us even study postcolonial theory!
Oh well: the suffering of animals or the suffering of human beings. The lives of millions of malaria suffers in Africa, or the poor birds whose eggs were made soft by DDT. It's all one. And I'm sure Bob Geldoff will come to the rescue anyway. Or Prince Charles.
Forget the hot air about 'carbon footprints'. If the human footprint on the planet means that places like Haiti are developed to the degree that they are no longer vulnerable to nature's every whim, then I say we should all stamp harder.
The animal testing issue is admittedly a complex one and personally I am very aware of the arguments both for and against. Although not ever involved in this sort of activity myself I am happy that people have the right to protest regarding this matter if they so wish and in no way do I object to them exercising that right. The short disrpution to my working day was acceptable and from what I saw and heard the protest seemed well managed and very reasonable.
Being a vet student myself, I've seen the waste food from the where the marmosets are kept – and if what they get to eat is anything to go by, they're kept like kings. The WASTE fruit is better than what we get in Sainsbury's, anyway. And knowing some of the people who work on this, I can't imagine them allowing animals to be kept like that. And apparently, the marmosets just get to play computer games all day. Lucky them.