Anjas has Parkinson’s disease. Today is a bad day. Her shoulders tremble, and her dark eyes seem glazed and unresponsive, fixed listlessly in the middle distance. ‘They call that stargazing,’ the lab technician explains. ‘It’s a part of the disease.’
Her symptoms are terrifyingly human. But in fact, Anjas is a Brazilian Marmoset monkey, and her disease is no accident of nature. Unbeknown to her, she developed Parkinson’s when scientists created a lesion inside her brain by injecting a poisonous substance into her skull as part of an experiment.
I am among the first members of the public to be allowed into the laboratories. On the eve of a European clampdown, which will see experiments on great apes banned in the EU, the tour is an unprecedented attempt to combat secrecy about animal experimentation. “You’re the guinea pigs,” jokes Graham*, an animal technician.
It is the job of Graham and his team to monitor the wellbeing of animals used in the experiments, and challenge scientists over animal cruelty. Graham says: “Sometimes you have to be brave, especially if you’ve got a multi-million pound grant-winning professor, and you think they’re pushing the edge a bit.”
Graham admits to becoming attached to the animals, most of whom are named. “If you’re someone who loves animals, there are very few jobs where you can earn decent money looking after them,” he says. He worries about what happens during the experiments, which technicians do not supervise. “To the scientists, the animals are a project,” he says. “When they take them out of that door, they could be doing anything.”
Marmoset monkeys are used in parkinson's disease experiments
Our presence at the lab is controversial, and the atmosphere tense. “There’s a huge resistance from the universities to this,” admits Graham. It’s easy to see why. The building of Oxford University’s new animal laboratory was delayed by 16 months in 2004 following intimidation and harassment by animal rights extremists. Plans for a £32 million primate research centre at Cambridge University also were shelved in the same year due to the spiralling costs of security. A minority of the protests have been extreme, some involving vandalism, intimidation and, on one occasion, grave robbery.
As he shows us the marmosets, technician Andy* is quiet and guarded. Weary of attempting to defend their jobs, the majority of the technicians no longer bother. Andy lies to almost everyone about it, even his young daughter.
“It bothers me that I can’t tell people about my job, but I’d be targeted,” he says, bluntly. He reveals that technicians who have been open about their work have been spat at, had their homes and cars vandalised, and been accused of being murderers. When I ask his opinion of the Animal Liberation Front, Andy’s answers are unequivocal. “I view them as terrorists,” he says. “Once you start being violent, that’s unacceptable. They have done a lot of damage to moderate animal welfarists.”
Michelle Thew is the Chief Executive of one such moderate group, The British Union of Anti Vivisectionists (BUAV). She calls the lab visit “a PR exercise” and is quick to counter with her own: a campaign video showing recent experiments on Macaques in Germany. Thew tells us this footage, which shows monkeys with broken skulls and ballooning tumours, was of experiments classified only as causing ‘moderate’ animal suffering.
Thew is dismissive of technicians’ claims that chose their job because they are animal lovers. “How can you be at home with your pet dog and then go into work and poison one?” she asks. “That just doesn’t wash with me. The animals shouldn’t be there.”
BUAV contest animal experimentation on intellectual, as well as moral, grounds, claiming that there remain “huge questions” about its scientific basis. They point to drugs like Opren, which cured arthritis in monkeys but went on to kill 61 humans in a 1980s trial, and Cylert, an ADHD drug, which worked on animals but gave thirteen children liver failure in 2005. ‘I have relatives that die of illnesses too,” says Thew. “I want to see tests that actually work.” But she claims that most animal testing is not about fighting disease, but ”someone getting a PhD.”
Thew believes she can abolish animal testing in her lifetime. “I’m a campaigner,” she says. “I have to get up every day and believe I can do this.” For now, though, change seems a long way off. Anjas cost the university £3,000 and they must pay £12 a day for her “rent.” Animal testing is not cheap, so if there were alternatives, scientists say, they would be using them. “But there aren’t,” insists Graham. “Would you volunteer? Would you have your heart stopped, and then started again? I wouldn’t.”
*names have been changed
