A matter of life or death

Abstract

“Animal rights hunger striker sends message from his deathbed,” announced the Observer in a front-page splash on 6 December, reporting a letter to his supporters from Barry Horne, who had refused food for the previous 60 days. “This is not for me, it is for every animal in every torture laboratory,” said Horne, who had been admitted to York District Hospital in the UK, from prison where he was serving an 18-year sentence for firebombing.The Observer accompanied the story by a second long piece headed “Animal lover ready to die to end vivisection” and an editorial saying that some animal experiments were “a cruel but necessary evil.”Horne's protest, later abandoned, was occasioned by the failure of the UK government to honour (yet) its pre-election pledge to support a Royal Commission to review the justification for animal experimentation. The Observer and many other newspapers amply described this political background, together with information about Horne's incendiary attacks on a variety of shops, including a cancer charity shop, in the south of England.A remarkable feature of the reportage was the almost total absence of scientific arguments over laboratory animals. Tabloid newspapers, in particular, treated the Horne story purely as news, while the broadsheets explored every possible angle except the science. Even those papers that criticised Horne's actions in editorials set a rather different tone in their (much more widely read) news pages through the use of terms such as “cruelty”, “vivisection” and “vivisector”.Journalists, seeking fresh perspectives, turned not to science but to human interest and the many nuances of protest. On behalf of the Times, Vanora Bennett visited York, recorded the “sullen group huddled outside the hospital grounds” and complained to her readers: “The night is bone-chilling, yet no one moves to make a space for me.” With far more important matters at stake, here was a reporter following the tradition of those who used to portray industrial actions solely in terms of pickets and braziers at the factory gate.Imminent martyrdom is, of course, news. At the same time, media neglect of its context, together with careless use of emotive language, can perpetuate stereotypes and impair understanding. Imminent martyrdom also calls forth sympathy, however horrendous the crimes for which someone like Barry Horne has been convicted. “Instinctively, one responds to his plight with compassion, the same compassion that goes out to cancer victims,” said the Times, while also recording the £3 million cost of the damage caused by his firebombing campaign on behalf of animal rights.The question that remains is why these human reactions so dominated coverage of the affair as to exclude from most accounts the underlying evidence about humane animal experimentation. Part of the answer lies with the scientific community itself, with decades of reluctance to engage in public discussion of these issues combined, on occasions, with willingness to defend the indefensible.In May 1990, the Independent published a story about an elderly, distinguished pharmacologist, working on under-anaesthetised rabbits at the National Institute for Medical Research in north London. This was based on first-hand videotape evidence obtained by undercover researchers on behalf of Advocates for Animals. The Medical Research Council, after a diligent enquiry, subsequently issued a report acknowledging mistakes at various levels within the Institute and elsewhere, and recommending appropriate changes. This did not, however, prevent some scientists from seeking to minimise the seriousness of what had happened, nor from trying to argue that the whole episode reflected little more than journalistic mischief.Of course, it's not surprising that scientists are often reluctant to go on record in the animal experimentation debate. The neuroscientist Colin Blakemore from Oxford University — a vocal defender of humane animal experimentation — was among those scientists threatened with death by an animal rights organisation in the eventuality of Horne's death. But extreme actions like these simply underline the need for better public understanding of the issues.When faced with a development such as Barry Horne's hunger strike, reporters and their editors do not simply respond to the immediate details of the event. They set the story within a framework determined in part by their understanding of what has gone before. If, through the failures of others, they have little awareness of the case for animal experimentation, then this will be reflected in their style of coverage.A singular error made by some medical researchers, vis-a-vis the media and the community at large, is to believe that the necessity of using animals in research and in safeguarding public health is self-evident. Despite the fact that UK legislation was thoroughly overhauled as recently as 1986, one good that might come from recent events would be an enquiry ensuring comprehensive ventilation, through the media, of the case for (and against) animal experimentation.