Dogs and animal testing: our report makes the industry cringe

(Rigorously) selected excerpts

They learnt some lessons from our response to their comment on our report regarding testing on primates. In their new ‘fact check’, Gircor has replaced the charming expression “Selected excerpts!” with a more serious reference to “Brandolini’s law” – according to which it takes more energy to discredit patter than it does to produce it. This is why this lobby has carefully chosen the parts that interested them...

After all, why talk about the deplorable results of the inspections and almost non-existent sanctions? This only motivates a good quarter of the claims expressed in our report! And it would surely have been inappropriate to comment on our comments about the Marshall BioResources company (leader of the dog “market” for laboratories and a member of Gircor) – to which we have nevertheless exclusively devoted four pages of the report.

It was surely better to report on the inadequacy of our examples of the degrees of suffering. As for them, the lobby prefers to highlight the “vast majority of mild/moderate procedures”... by forgetting to specify what these terms mean in concrete terms.

Even logic is not their forte

Helping their self-promotion, the “fact-check” refers to a list of Nobel Prizes which are “the result of research involving animals”. And if so many Nobel prizes involve animal testing, that is because science could not have progressed without it… right? In fact, with the same reasoning, the fact that an overwhelming majority of these prizes have been given to men would mean that women would be incapable of leading progress in science without men, even if they were given the means to do so – which, obviously, is not true.

But we should not expect anything more from an organisation that accuses us of “playing on emotions” a few days after having celebrated the shameful propaganda by Mauritian breeders who supply laboratories around the world with macaques and play on fear to manipulate public opinion.

The cherry on the cake: our report was inspired by “researchers... in moral philosophy” (who Gircor clearly do not consider to be “thorough” experts). Why? Because the two pages that are dedicated to ethics actually cite... ethics specialists: that is to say, specialists in moral philosophy.

You can help us

To help dogs, you can act by signing our petitions for an end to their use by laboratories and for the closure of the Marshall BioResources breeding farm in Mézilles.

P.S: while it is not customary, we thank Gircor for the information it communicated relating to Finland in its article. It is better than nothing.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice