As anyone who has ever failed to dodge animal rights activists’ stalls on the high street will know, it’s hard to take them too seriously. Reasoning with individuals who still maintain a Disneyesque view of animals is usually a fruitless exercise. No amount of argument will convince them that lab rats don’t think like Einstein or suffer like Princess Diana.

The Bradford protest organisers, Stop Animal Experiments at Bradford Uni (SAEAB), are only too happy to use shock tactics to tug at our heartstrings. At the same time, SAEAB seems keen to show that its position is more scientifically in the know than that of Bradford University’s own researchers. ‘The testing of chemicals makes up a large part of animal research’, the group says in a section on its website called Bad Science, ‘so why is it that so many of these products are unsafe and carcinogenic when they have been proved as safe?’. SAEAB goes to great lengths to explain that ‘vivisection is scientific fraud’ because it is ineffective and inefficient due to ‘massive’ differences in anatomy between humans and animals. This, they argue, means that drugs may be developed that can actually ‘maim and kill’ humans despite getting a green light after extensive animal tests.

Elsewhere on its site, it attacks what it sees as the incompetence of researchers at Bradford, lists drugs that were tested on animals and had negative side-effects on humans, and explains why many tests carried out at Bradford University are unnecessary as scientists elsewhere will have already conducted similar experiments. It suggests that the work at the university amounts to gratuitous abuse of poor Thumper. Animal-rights activists tend to regard sceintific research centres as Auschwitzes for mice.

Tellingly, in taking this ‘bad science’, ‘unnecessary experiments’ approach, SAEAB, along with various other protest groups, is in effect applying the very criteria that has officially been adopted across UK research institutions: the 3Rs, namely to reduce, replace and refine the use of animals in research. These principles are based on William Russell and RL Burch’s 1959 book The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique.

Accepting these principles, and effectively creating common ground between animal-rights protesters and vivisectionists, has now become an essential pre-requisite for much state and private research funding alike. A group of government-funded research councils, along with the leading medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, has collaborated on a guidance document on responsibility in the use of animals in bioscience research. Researchers receiving funding from these bodies are ‘expected to give appropriate consideration to the 3Rs in any research involving animals which has the potential to cause the animals harm, and to explain in their research’.

In order to facilitate this, the former UK government announced in 2007 that it would double the funding of the body that undertakes research into the 3Rs, the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animal Research (NC3Rs), to over £5million in 2010-11. The NC3Rs declares: ‘Replacement is the ultimate aim for the centre, but as long as the use of animals continues to be necessary, every effort must be made to minimise the numbers used and improve their welfare.’ The organisation is mandating bringing together ‘stakeholders in the 3Rs in academia, industry, government and animal welfare organisations to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas, and the translation of research findings into practice that will benefit both animals and science’.