 |
|
| ©The HSUS |
|
| Andrew Rowan, Ph.D. |
|
by Andrew N. Rowan, Ph.D.
Over the past few years, The Humane Society of the United States has grown substantially in size, visibility, effectiveness and impact.
It has accomplished this by dramatically raising the visibility of certain animal issues of national scope (media coverage concerning The HSUS has increased 10-20 fold in the past five years), and by developing an outcome-based planning and reporting system.
These are impressive gains and there will be more in the coming years. However, the many visible signs of progress (e.g. on animal fighting, horse slaughter, confinement agriculture, direct care and response activities and the like) are only part of what The HSUS is doing to promote animal welfare.
There is another very important, but less visible aspect of HSUS staff activity—namely, our efforts to raise the status of animal issues in the marketplace of ideas, and our long-term influence on the way such issues are considered by public policy networks. These gains, often coming in "behind-the-scenes" venues, usually develop over years (or even decades) and are easily overlooked.
Attitudes Toward Animals Shift
Today, entire fields of scholarship are devoted to examination of the factors that have led to the growth and expansion of what is now a $2 billion-a-year animal protection movement in the United States.
At the heart of this development was a change in societal attitudes, as people moved from seeing animals only for their instrumental value (e.g. what can they do for us—provide draft power, food, security) to recognizing the welfare needs of animals (they suffer as humans do) and the additional enrichment of human lives that they provide via companionship and esthetic value.
|
“The recognition of animal suffering required a paradigm shift in the thinking of both scientists and the public. |
How we as a society view our relationship with animals has a dramatic impact on how we end up treating animals in our care, and on how we consider the needs of animals used for food, entertainment, the attainment of medical and scientific knowledge, companionship, recreation, and the like.
Much of the change in our recognition of animal needs has been driven by the development of new ideas and knowledge generated by behavioral scientists who have shown us what animals experience and how similar the suffering of mammals and birds at least is to our own suffering.
Today, such knowledge and attitudes may seem obvious, but they were not always so. The recognition of animal suffering required a paradigm shift in the thinking of both scientists and the public.
 |
|
| ©The HSUS |
|
| There are 1,200 chimpanzees in biomedical laboratories. |
|
Scientific progress relies on paradigm shifts where society starts to rethink its views on how it should consider and interact with the world around it. For the most part, such shifts take years to effect.
When Wegener first proposed his theory of continental drift (that the world's continents were moving very slowly) around 1915, everybody ridiculed him—even his colleagues in the geological sciences. Fifty years later, the theory was included in school text books, and nobody can now imagine how we could have thought any differently.
Seeds of a Research Revolution
A more pertinent example of a paradigm shift has unfolded over the past fifty years in the world of animal research. Around 1953, Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize-winning immunologist, persuaded colleagues at the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) in England that science had advanced to the point where it could start looking at techniques that used fewer animals or caused less suffering.
UFAW hired two young biologists, Bill Russell and Rex Burch, to look into the matter and, in 1959, their report was published as a book—"The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique."
|
“Once an object of ridicule, the concept of alternatives is now the way of the future. |
For the next fifteen years the book and the ideas it contained (now immortalized as the Three Rs of Reduction, Replacement, and Refinement) received very little notice.
After the book came out, the British parliament launched an inquiry into the idea of alternatives, but concluded that science was already doing everything it could to reduce and replace animal use.
In the United States, the Three Rs received very short shrift from the scientific community, although several animal organizations (including the The Humane Society of the United States and the Animal Welfare Institute in the USA) promoted it.
Beginning in 1980, however, a campaign to stop the testing of cosmetics in animals forced the personal care product industry to reconsider its approach, and suddenly the concept of "alternatives" became a serious issue, at least for a few corporations. A Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) was established at Johns Hopkins University and the first few grants to develop alternatives awarded.
Slowly, but steadily, attitudes began to change.
Industry scientists were the first to adopt the idea and begin to push it forward on their own (and not simply because of pressure from animal activists). Meanwhile, academic scientists remained very resistant to the idea (the National Institutes of Health refused to even use the term "alternatives" throughout most of the 1990s).
Even that resistance has now ended.
Alternatives to the Forefront
One of the reasons why "alternatives" have now become accepted terminology is because research funding worldwide for their development and implementation has grown from a few hundred thousand dollars a year in 1980 to more than $50 million today.
Nothing develops scientific concentration and interest quite so effectively as the availability of research funding. However, the scientific potential of alternatives in toxicity testing and safety evaluation is also driving interest.
At many points along the fifty year path of taking the concept of the Three Rs from its initial development to its acceptance as mainstream policy, The HSUS has been a significant player. Shortly after the book by Russell & Burch appeared, The HSUS established a Committee on Alternatives to further the concept.
From the mid-1970s onwards, The HSUS had a series of scientists on staff who kept pressing the concept both in public policy and in scientific settings. The HSUS has worked closely with CAAT since its founding in 1981, and was active in the establishment of the federal entity responsible for validating new alternatives, the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Validation of Alternative Methods (ICCVAM).
"An extraodinary development"
Most recently, the National Research Council (NRC) produced a report on the future of toxicity testing that basically predicted that non-animal tests ("alternatives") were the Future.
The HSUS's Dr. Martin Stephens was a member of the panel. The National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Toxicology Program and the Environmental Protection Agency have signed an MoU that essentially endorses the NRC report and agrees to work to implement its vision.
In a USA Today article, NIH Director Elias Zerhouni is credited with saying that the initiative will not mean that animal testing will disappear overnight, but signals the beginning of the end.
For those who have felt themselves laboring in the wilderness promoting non-animal methodologies, this is an extraordinary development. Once an object of ridicule, the concept of alternatives is now the way of the future.
The concept has definitely arrived and now it is simply a matter of organizing the necessary funds and the research resources to make sure that the future we have all dreamed about comes to fruition sooner rather than later.
Dr. Andrew N. Rowan is Executive Vice President for Operations of The HSUS, and the CEO of Humane Society International, and president of The HSUS Wildlife Land Trust board of directors.
