Twenty scientists from various countries and five NGOs have published this Friday an open letter addressed to the government of Spain and the autonomous government of Catalonia (northeast), as well as to the University of Barcelona to demand that they stop the experiments with 38 beagle dogs, of which 32 will be sacrificed after testing a new drug on them.
The group of scientists, including Dr. Luis Falcon, president of GNU Solidario, and the NGOs Research Without Animal Experimentation (ISEA), Franz Weber Foundation, Animal Free Research and Plant-Based Health Professionals, propose opening a public debate with representatives of the University and the Generalitat.
In their letter they denounce that each year more than a million animals are used in all kinds of trials, where “cruel, ineffective and unreliable” acts are practiced that end up generating “physical and emotional trauma”, with a high rate of death, and they assure that “around 96% of these experiments are a failure”.
“Science must realize that humans are very different from other species”, states the letter, which questions the position of the University of Barcelona (UB) on the alleged need to use live animals for this research with 38 beagle dogs, and the hiring of a company, Vivotecnia, involved in an investigation in its Madrid laboratory, in which “acts of extreme cruelty were documented.”
Faced with the continuation of tests with animals, the undersigned researchers defend the “great advances in research methods without animals that are designed to benefit humans” and give as an example “computer models, artificial intelligence and organs in a chip”.
They also claim to “invest in these methods” to produce “more reliable biomedical research, but also a healthier, more humane, respectful and empathic society.”
The letter recalls two relevant milestones regarding the feelings of animals: the Cambridge Declaration of 2012, which states that humans are not the only ones that possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness; and the 2019 Toulon Declaration, which stresses that animals must be universally considered as people and not as things.
Both manifestos, also signed by professionals from institutions such as MIT, the California Institute of Technology or the Max Planck Institute, serve the signatories of the letter to demand the halting of the experiment promoted by the Spanish Ministry of Science, from a company based in the Barcelona Science Park, and which will take place in March at the Vivotecnia laboratories in Madrid.
They also call for the release of the dogs and the conversion of the University of Barcelona “into a reference institution in the adoption of advanced and open science and technology relevant to humans without the use of non-human animals”.
Luis Falcón, one of the signatories of the letter, raises the need for a public and open debate. “To us,” he says, “they won’t be able to tell us that these experiments are necessary from a scientific point of view, they may be in a bureaucratic sense, but not scientific, and much less ethical.”
The president of GNU Solidario proposes an open debate between university officials and the regional government to “talk about experiments with animals and without them, with society and the press as witnesses”. “Let’s see how public money is used and how these experiments affect human health and non-human animals, and after that we decide if we want to continue down this path,” he concludes. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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