An interesting row has arisen around the transposition of an EU Directive into UK law. It has been sparked by a claim that stray or feral animals will be used in animal research, and tells us a great deal about how anti-animal research lobbyists sometimes mislead their supporters by raising phoney "issues".
Although the BUAV often do good work in promoting the welfare of selected animals, their latest campaign was based on a self-generated myth that really seemed to spiral out of control.
The basic claim of the BUAV was that a change to the law meant, from January next year, there was a chance that former pets would be snatched from the street by scientists and "tortured" in laboratories. BUAV's Michelle Thew gave examples in a recent Huff Post piece that implied the animals would be electrocuted and forced to swim.
A shocking claim indeed. So why was it that the UK's most respected animal welfare organisation, the RSPCA, disagreed that there was any such risk? As the RSPCA themselves stated "...we have looked into this very carefully and believe there will not, in fact, be any change to the current situation in the UK - and that the intention of the Home Office remains NOT to allow the use of any stray animals."
The answer lies in the full text, and the wider context, of the proposed legislation. In it, there is a presumption against the use of strays, but with the caveat that they may be used in certain extreme situations, such as if a serious disease was sweeping through a community of stray or feral animals, or that this serious disease looked as if it was likely to infect domestic pets.
It makes sense that our animal welfare laws are not self-defeating and that we are able to help animals that are suffering by conducting "animal research" like, for instance, taking a blood sample.
That said, it remains massively improbable that strays would be used for this research because of important caveats in the legislation that explicitly state that it must be unavoidable, and in no conceivable circumstances would the research involve the measures described by the BUAV campaign.
Meanwhile the Home Office, which would licence such research, stated both that the proposed legislation was identical to current arrangements with regard to justified exceptions (and therefore there would be no actual change), and restated that it could not envisage any situation where strays would be used. Furthermore, the UK biosciences sector, which would theoretically be doing any such research, actually lobbied against the use of stray or feral animals in laboratories at both the domestic and European level.
The BUAV's claims at first seemed like a harmless attempt to look busy - worrying supporters with a false claim that there would be any de-facto change in the use of strays. As usual, they misrepresented what animal research really is and glossed over the fact that, in UK law, even the breeding of a mouse, the testing of veterinary cure or the taking of a blood sample can be classified as an experiment.
The trick seemed to work. Supporters were outraged and wrote to their MPs, some of whom tabled EDMs and asked questions in Parliament. One of these EDMs praised the BUAV, and requested a Parliamentary debate on the issues it was raising.
It is at this point that we must ask ourselves whether it is right that the BUAV, which has been happy to misrepresent both the legislation and the true nature of animal research, should be setting the terms of a Parliamentary debate on legislation about animal research.
The BUAV are now falsely claiming victory for achieving a "change in government position" on the use of strays. There has of course been no such change in government position, but the BUAV may simply have realised that their scheme is rumbled, and their red herring pickled, so it's best to draw the campaign to an end before anyone notices it was spurious.
Well, the RSPCA, the government and the scientific community noticed - and I wonder if MPs will be less willing in the future to accept the BUAV at face value the next time they make an hysterical claim about animal research.