A Bradford Student attacks SHAC!

Promoted :-

Come and protest, but don't expect much support
17.11.2009 03:30

You can come and protest all you like, free speech and all that. But the university is not going to give up vivisection research and the students will not be intimidated by you. The vast majority of us simply think you're wasting your time, you'll have no luck getting much support from the students. You'd have a ruddy impossible time trying to get the students on campus to not wear leather or eat chicken, let alone convincing them not to support animal testing.

You can complain all you like about animal testing but how many of you actually have an undergraduate degree in biology or chemistry let alone a masters or PhD? If you are so anti-testing why don't you actually contribute towards finding alternative methods as opposed to simply blandly condemning? Forgive the phrase, but back seat driver springs to mind? It's all well and good trying to shout that alternatives exist but anyone with even the most basic university biology or chemistry background knows that this is NOT true in the vast majority of cases. Yes in some cases alternatives have been found for instance with specific skin irritation testing for cosmetics, but at the end of the day with current technology in vitro techniques cannot yet model a full scale living organism. There are no two ways about that... we do not have the technology to be able to fully replace living animal models yet. It'd be great if we did because at the end of the day contrary to what you try to tell the public the vast majority of scientists do not enjoy having to routinely kill animals, yes there are a minority who over step the line (I have seen the video of a man punching the beagle at HLS on youtube) however they should simply be sacked. It's no good condemning the majority of hard working scientists for the actions of a very tiny minority, the vast majority would never punch a dog for simply struggling or barking. In the same way I'm going to give your local group (WYARG?) the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not responsible for the minority of activists who think it's acceptable to intimidate people by smashing their windows, painting lewd messages, and burning property. I simply ask that you do not tar all scientists with the same brush.

One day in the future I'm sure with further advances we will eventually be able to replace animals, but until then animal testing is what we are stuck with. Incidentally many of the in vitro techniques used for alternative testing actually use cells harvested from animals, so whilst you try to promote the alternatives is it not hypocritical that you are still promoting a method that involves an animal at some point in the line?


Bradford student