Unliberated Creatures of the European Union

The European Union’s Directive of 2010 “on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes” laid down the rules and standards for animal research in all the member states. Its Article 58 required a review of the Directive’s own success to be issued no later than 10 November, 2017. So here it now is, or rather they are:  the summary Report from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, etc., of 10 pages or so, and the rather opaquely titled Staff Working Document, containing “more detailed analysis of the different consultation activities and other information sources used”, and covering about 145 pages.

Another mighty deposit of conscientious bureaucracy, then: important, because this represents the progressive front for animals in laboratories, setting and monitoring standards which practitioners in Europe will be expected to keep and will therefore have a professional interest in persuading institutions in other countries to adopt (and this does happen, to a modest extent); not very important, on the other hand, because the review comes too soon to be useful. The Directive itself came into force back in 2013, but the last of the transpositions into national law was not completed until 2015. Besides, compliance with some important parts of the Directive (notably “common standards for accommodation and care”) was not obligatory until January 2017. In short, the Report concludes that “trends in animal use at EU level will not be known before 2019.” And the most that can be deduced from all the “consultation activities” deployed in the Staff Working Document is that the Directive “is generally considered to be a sound foundation for the regulation of animals used in scientific research.” 

So these texts make a disappointing and laborious read. There’s a great mass of comment from nations and institutions, but most of it is digested into generalities, and all of it is anonymized. Occasional details do suddenly remind the dazed reader that behind all this de-personalized discourse are real places and experiences, and real animals. See under ‘Sharing organs and tissues’, for instance: the 2010 Directive (Article 18) stated that “Member States shall facilitate, where appropriate [every bureaucrat’s get-out-of-jail-free word], the establishment of programmes for the sharing of organs and tissues of animals killed”; so now we’re told, by way of compliance, that “announcing planned animal killing in one establishment by an internal calendar assists planning.” Through the fog of abstract style you can descry a strange and telling bit of laboratory life there.

Or see under ‘Re-homing’. This is a practice authorized by the Directive (Article 19) provided that “appropriate measures” have been taken to safeguard the welfare of the animals. Yet it seems that out of all the many millions of animals that have passed through Europe’s laboratories during the review period of four years or so, this one possible way of coming out alive has been granted to “only a few dogs and even fewer rabbits”.

It’s a miserable picture, and it reminds me of a poignant scene in the 1883 novel Heart and Science by Wilkie Collins which I shall quote as a digression (also as a very fine piece of writing). It comes near the end of the story, when the vivisector Dr Benjulia, defeated as a scientist and despairing as a man, has gone into his laboratory for the last time, watched at a distance by one of his servants:

The door was opened again; the flood of light streamed out on the darkness. Suddenly the yellow glow was spotted by the black figures of small swiftly-running creatures—perhaps cats, perhaps rabbits—escaping from the laboratory. The tall form of the master followed slowly, and stood revealed watching the flight of the animals. In a moment more, the last of the liberated creatures came out—a large dog, limping as if one of its legs was injured. It stopped as it passed the master, and tried to fawn on him. He threatened it with his hand. “Be off with you, like the rest!” he said. The dog slowly crossed the flow of light, and was swallowed up in darkness.

The last of them that could move was gone.

As Collins says in his preface to the novel, “I leave the picture to speak for itself.”

Returning to the report: there are positive things to find in these documents. One reason for the delays in putting the Directive into effect is that some of the member states started off far behind the new standards. In such countries there may have been “no previous requirements or formal structures for project evaluation”. For them, even partial compliance with the EU rules for training and supervision will have meant “better animal welfare, better recognition of pain, distress and suffering, and better understanding of animal behaviours and needs.” The change effected by the EU Directive may have been slight in the United Kingdom, but its effect upon the sum total of EU animal research has been very beneficial.

Good evidence is provided, too, for the report’s claim that “the level of challenge to animal studies has increased” – i.e. that research projects and the laboratories themselves really are subject to stricter assessments – even though, as the animal rights groups quoted in the report (they do get a say in it) rightly protest, there is no record of projects failing altogether to pass the test. The evidence comes in the form of complaints from some of the institutions: “delays to projects have been observed”, “scientists try to avoid doing animal experiments because of the administrative burden”, “the process [of ethical review, etc.] has limited some research at their institutes”, and “The directive has necessitated closure of some animal units as they did not comply with the requirements.” These grievances, assuming them to be sincere, are surely significant and welcome.

In its preamble, paragraph 10, the Directive calls itself “an important step towards achieving the final goal of full replacement of procedures on live animals for scientific and educational purposes as soon as it is scientifically possible to do so”. But as the Staff Working Document admits, so far during the period of the Directive’s authority there has been “no apparent reduction in animal use”. (And perhaps even that phrase is really a euphemism for ‘increase’, such as there has indeed been in the U.K.) Nor, even in the case of non-human primates, the most officially controversial of the animal research victims, does a reduction seem likely in the near future, for the report accepts the advice of the SCHEER ‘Opinion’ (reported in this blog on 17 July), and accordingly states that “no phasing-out timetable for the use of non-human primates is proposed.” So the Directive’s paragraph 10 optimism reappears now with a subtle re-direction: “The scientific community need to continue and improve efforts to explain why at this stage the use of animals in scientific procedures is still necessary.” Settle it with PR, then, and indeed one of the respondents (from the U.K. I would guess) mentions “significant progress in this area” on the part of the U.K.’s ‘Concordat on Openness’. Britain showing the way in modern vivisection, as usual; that it’s not yet the way forward is what one evidently has to learn from this 2017 review.

 

Notes and references:

The Report can be read here:   http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1510252227435&uri=COM:2017:631:FIN

and the Staff Working Document here:   http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1510252227435&uri=SWD:2017:353:FIN

and the EU Directive 2010/63 here:     http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:276:0033:0079:en:PDF

The passage from Heart and Science, a Story of the Present Time (1883) comes in Chapter 62. The novel was discussed in this blog on 21 November 2015 at https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/the-real-benjulia/

The SCHEER report is reviewed in this blog at

https://voiceforethicalresearchatoxford.wordpress.com/2017/07/17/brothers-and-cousins/