IN AN ideal world, people would not test medicines on animals. Such experiments are stressful and sometimes painful for animals, and expensive and time-consuming for people. Yet there are vast gaps in medical knowledge which animal experimentation can help close. People have power over animals, so they use animals to help their own species.

Yet the notion that animal suffering is pitted against human welfare-animal pain against human gain-is too stark. After all, it is in scientists’ interests to treat animals well. If laboratory animals are properly looked after, differences in experimental results are more likely to be down to the science than to the guinea-pigs’ health. Sometimes, numbing animals’ pain makes sense, too. Research has shown that giving pain-relieving drugs to animals that are undergoing experimental surgery may enhance the results, by making the animal’s experience more like a person’s. And some changes in the regulation of scientific research, proposed by the European Commission on May 5th, should further reduce animal suffering and at the same time produce better science.

Murine morals

Between 50m and 100m animals are used in research each year around the world, says the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a British think-tank. Europe has the world’s most restrictive laws on animal experiments. Even so its scientists use some 12m animals a year, most of them mice and rats, for medical research. That number has been creeping up, mainly because scientists can now plant foreign genes into creatures so that they better mimic human responses to disease.

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