Animal Testing : Cats

What is the nature of the experiments on cats and dogs? The animals are used to investigate a host of human afflictions, to see how the body works, and especially in the case of dogs, for drug and product testing. Some have even been employed in military research. Yet if similar treatment were meted out to the family cat or dog there would be outrage.

Despite being favourite companion animals, cats and dogs are forced into battle against some of our most serious ailments - even though there is a wealth of evidence demonstrating that they make hopelessly unreliable 'models' of human beings.

Cats are used for research into stroke, whilst dogs are commonly employed to investigate heart disease; both are used for migraine research. Experimenters try to mimic human disease by artificially inducing the condition, or its consequences, in animals. So, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, cats were brain-damaged following a deliberately induced 'stroke', produced by blocking arteries in the animal's head.

Cats for Research

The other major use of these animals, especially cats, is in physiological research - to investigate how the body works. One technique employed by physiologists is to damage or interfere with a part of the body and then observe the resulting effects. Usually dubbed 'fundamental biological research' because they don't necessarily claim any practical application, such experiments are often motivated by scientific curiosity, and account for much of the work done on cats.

A popular subject for physiologists is the cat's nervous system. For instance, at the University of Wales in Cardiff, cats (and rats) were used for research into nerve cells from a part of the brain called the thalamus. To obtain brain tissue, the rats were decapitated. In the case of cats, they were anaesthetised, the skull surgically opened and the membranes lining the inside of the head removed. They were then killed, the optic nerve severed and the brain removed to obtain the nerve cells for experiment. In another example, cats were subjected to spinal cord damage at the University of Cambridge to investigate nerve pathways.

Another favourite area for physiologists is the cat's visual system and, historically, many animals have been blinded to investigate the visual cortex. A 5-year survey of scientific journals during the 1980s revealed 156 published papers on 'sight deprivation' in the world's laboratories.

Silent Suffering

Around half of the experiments on cats use anaesthetics at some stage and many of these animals are 'fortunate' in that they are killed at the end of the procedure before the anaesthetic wears off - unless, that is, the experimenter has made a mistake with the anaesthetic and the animal feels everything. Such errors are never mentioned in scientific reports or government statistics, yet just as in human therapeutic surgery, they must occur; the difference is that people often live to tell the tale.

Some experiments use no anaesthetic and there is no doubt that animals suffer. In a long series of tests at the University of Glasgow, cats have been deliberately infected with feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) to investigate its effects. FIV produces an AIDS-like disease and is seen by some scientists as an 'animal model' of HIV. It should be stressed, however, that FIV only harms its host species - cats - just as HIV is only pathogenic for human beings. In the Glasgow experiments, FIV has produced fever, conjunctivitis and inflammation of the eye, with one report describing how a cat developed 'profound anorexia', weight loss, stomach pain and jaundice. It was killed on 'humane grounds'.

List Of Animals
Animal testing cats	Animal testing cows
Animal testing dogs	Animal testing facts figures
Animal testing frogs	Animal testing rabbits