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One Voice has had all of the prefectural decrees that allow the scaring of brown bears in Ariège suspended!

One Voice has had all of the prefectural decrees that allow the scaring of brown bears in Ariège suspended!

One Voice has had all of the prefectural decrees that allow the scaring of brown bears in Ariège suspended!
24.08.2022
One Voice has had all of the prefectural decrees that allow the scaring of brown bears in Ariège suspended!
Wildlife

What a magnificent victory for brown bears at the Toulouse Administrative Tribunal! After an initial urgent suspension at the beginning of August, it was the turn of six other decrees issued by the Ariège Prefecture between 22 June and 7 July 2022 to be suspended! They authorised scaring shots near and on brown bears that live on in the Pyrenees during the 2022 season.

Illustrative photo: a bear and her cubs in Germany

After the hearing on 8 August, where our lawyer, Hélène Thouy, fought argument after argument against the Prefecture, it will have taken almost ten additional days to close the investigation. Days during which elements of both sides continued to be exchanged mercilessly. But the doubt benefited the bears on every level, especially since the Prefecture had no proof for what they were saying to justify the scaring shots.

Administrative tribunals more and more amenable to arguments in favour of animals

Being daring, which pushed us to attack the interim suspension orders — that is to say to urgently interrupt the shooting being put into practice, — has paid off! Perhaps we rejoice in this victory because we think that the tribunals are more and more open to arguments in favour of animals; perhaps because the climate and biodiversity crisis is finally getting through to the tribunals. Or perhaps our arguments are better and better expressed and backed up by data. Perhaps also because the requirement for the State to set an example expected by our fellow citizens has also ended up affecting the judges, who from now on would like any decision to be substantiated and not to seem arbitrary or to be supporting private interests or any corporatism.

We would like to offer peace to these already fragile bears!

Brown bears in France have disappeared bit by bit over the course of time, under human pressures. There are therefore few bears in the Pyrenees. Their population is stagnating below the threshold of viability for the species. There are only about one hundred bears in France, and they feed mainly on vegetation. We are far from the fantasies and irrational fears spread about them by farmers, who are compensated in any case, and always send their herds to the abattoir.

These scarings, required by the State (in the absence of lethal shots called for by farmers) due to the protected status of the species enjoyed by bears on a European and French level, are harmful nevertheless. Particularly because they are susceptible to preventing the female bears from carrying their pregnancies to term, threatening the survival of the species and the individuals concerned.

«It is vital to allow the possibility for brown bears to take back possession of their space. Our species quashes others everywhere and all of the time to ensure their own safety. But we have come too far, the planet is dying with the animals and even us… It is more than time for us to give them what is rightfully theirs. The bears all have their place in the Pyrenean mountains, as do the wolves in the Alpes or the sharks at Réunion Island too.»Muriel Arnal, President of One Voice

Leave nature be…

One Voice incidentally does not support the reintroduction process by humans. What is the use in subjecting them to capture and uprooting them from bears elsewhere, often already pregnant and vulnerable, to force them into a place where nothing is done for their welfare and where a multitude of people want them dead?! The farmers working on the mountain pastures concerned by the suspended decrees are now talking in hushed tones about poaching them…

One Voice does however support, amongst others in the Pyrenees, making natural spaces a sanctuary and rewilding.

Seven hidden mountain pastures!

Bears will thus have the possibility of evolving freely in the mountain pastures of the pastoral groups in Taus-Espugues, Arreau, Coumebière, Sentenac d’Oust, l’Izard, Ourdouas, and, of course, Ustou Col d’Escots where the favourable decision was obtained at the start of August 2022

As a reminder, the State Council has already cancelled the ministerial decrees of 2019 and 2020, allowing prefects to put decrees in place like those that we just got the immediate suspension for. We have therefore launched proceedings alongside this to get the one from this year, published on 20 June 2022, cancelled. We are waiting for a date in the months to come.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

Transparency and communication strategies in animal testing

Transparency and communication strategies in animal testing

Transparency and communication strategies in animal testing
22.08.2022
Transparency and communication strategies in animal testing
Animal testing

From 12 to 16 June an international congress on animal testing (FELASA 2022) is being held in Marseille, gathering together those who practice animal testing throughout the world. Listening to what is being said, we understand that claims of transparency put forward in the last few years are just a communication strategy to attract public favour.

Monday 13 June in Marseille. Two buildings, around fifteen rooms, a huge exhibition hall, and more than one thousand people. The FELASA 2022 congress, co-organised in Marseille by the French Association of Science and Technology in Laboratory Animals (Afstal), has clearly been a success. One Voice was there in order to hear what is being said on the most talked about topic of the year: ‘communication’.

Origins of ‘transparency’

Since February 2021, you have probably heard of the “transparency charter” on animal testing, produced by the Interprofessional Group of Reflection and Communication in Research (Gircor, a French animal testing lobby group). This charter is not a French invention, since a document of the same type was released in England in 2012 and numerous other countries followed.

If you think this is good news, think again: these charters look to change public opinion, which has become more and more negative towards animal testing in recent years. As the slogan of the congress says well, “it’s all about communication”.

‘Transparency’ methods

In fact, the president of the European lobby on animal testing insisted on the benefits of being ‘proactive’ in processing information during the open session. For example, the figures on animal testing can be obtained, negotiated, and broadcast quickly by lobbies, which allows them to put forward a message favouring their interests. Animal rights associations, who will take longer to communicate, therefore have no reverberation in the media.

At the heart of the lobbies’ message is the idea that animal testing is ‘vital’, ‘necessary’ for health and science, ‘well regulated’, and ‘managed’ by the ‘ethical’ principles of the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement). Affirmations that we find in transparency charters and on the websites of the majority of those who have signed these charters, with no more information.

Convince, convince, convince

Throughout the congress, a speaker from the University of Washington in Seattle defined transparency as ‘engaging’ the public on the subject of animal testing. But as was seen on the slides, the goal was in fact to win them over to their cause. Hence the project by this University to appoint a full-time person to work on its communication strategy on this subject.

After all, why spend money on developing alternatives when we can use it to manipulate public opinion?

Transparency… in private

Even though the common problems of animal testing are never mentioned in public, the context of the congress, between colleagues, loosens some tongues. The person responsible for an “organisation responsible for animal welfare” acknowledges for example that some colleagues still tell him regularly that they see no problem with mice being caught by their tail (something which causes stress for these animals).

And the informal discussions with French people present on site are just as interesting, in particular concerning the significant deficiencies in the evaluation and project authorisation systems…

Thus, after having scratched the surface of empty public speeches that aim to be reassuring, we still have a bitter taste in our mouths when it comes to those who still dare to talk about transparency in animal testing… in particular when we must systematically go through tribunals to obtain public documents.

This article is the first in a series which will present different aspects of the FELASA 2022 congress:

  1. Transparency and communication strategies in animal testing
  2. Language elements and rhetorical fallacies in animal testing
  3. The animal testing industry makes propaganda
  4. The ethical short-sightedness of animal testing
  5. Will there soon be more primates in laboratories?

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

Forced swimming: the businesses moving forward and the industry that resists

Forced swimming: the businesses moving forward and the industry that resists

Forced swimming: the businesses moving forward and the industry that resists
16.08.2022
Forced swimming: the businesses moving forward and the industry that resists
Animal testing

After our denunciation of electric shock procedures and forced swimming authorised in France this year and us bringing to light the images and practices of forced swimming in France, the Ministry of Research did not react. Elsewhere in the world, businesses and universities are abandoning this test, while anglophone lobbies defend it and pass it off as being essential to the general public, even if it means making muddy comparisons and abandoning any critical thinking.

Image: screenshot of “Animal Models of Depression – Chronic Despair Model (CDM)”

For several weeks, you have rallied with us on social networks to appeal to the Ministry of Research and ask them to ban forced swimming tests. You can keep the pressure on with the model tweets and the letters presented in our previous articles and encourage businesses and French universities to join in with the model tweets proposed at the end of the article.

Interrogated by the media, the Ministry limited itself to repeating the usual clichés on the regulations and ethics committees, failing to comment on the suffering of these animals and to mention the letter that we sent them asking for them to communicate the details of the project reported in order to be able to verify how the existence of alternatives has been evaluated — a letter that they only recently responded to with the same clichés they gave to the media.

Leaders in research are abandoning the forced swimming test but the industry is resisting

Abroad, the PETA association has been campaigning since 2018 against the use of the forced swimming test by large research companies. Between 2018 and 2021, around fifteen companies confirmed that they would no longer use these tests. When Johnson & Johnson, Roche Pharma, AstraZeneca, Sage Therapeutics, Pfizer, Bayer, or GlaxoSmithKline have gone in this direction, we have to ask why this test does not purely and simply disappear from authorised practices.

In reaction to these campaigns and their broadcast in the media, the United States lobby Speaking of Research (SoR) did not hesitate in writing a post at the beginning of 2020 to condemn ‘irresponsible journalism’, while the British lobby Understanding Animal Research (UAR) published a summary sheet in October 2020 (unpublished since but recorded on the web archive), then a new article and video in Spring 2021 on this subject. This supported the English University of Bath’s refusal to stop forced swimming tests in particular (condemned by PETA in a video published at the end of 2020, below).

Animal testing lobbies ruin their own credibility

As usual with animal testing lobbies, their content talks more about depression and good practice than the animals and the impact of this test on them. SoR maintains that animal advocates exaggerate their suffering and UAR explains that the animals are not left in the water until exhaustion and that they float naturally.

The two lobbies however carefully avoid finding out why the animals give up fighting and what this involves psychologically for them.
The summary sheet by UAR was content in saying that this test stresses the animals “in the same way as when a wild rat finds itself in a cold climate in winter”… based on a 1979 study that compares leaving rats in a cold room at 4°C for hours and making them swim five times for one minute at thirty minute intervals in 10°C water. Nothing to do with this subject, which may explain why their 2021 post just does not address the issue of the stress inflicted upon these animals.

And SoR’s credibility regarding strict methodology is not the best: the post cites a study from 2012 saying that they were making the mice swim for six minutes and the rats for fifteen minutes… while the fifteen minutes mentioned in the study relates to a ‘pre-test’ carried out the day before, and not the test itself (which lasts five minutes for the rats). When we know that there are these organisations that regularly criticise animal associations and present themselves as specialists available to the media, we are right to ask questions on their motivations…

Help us to put a stop to these tests

It is unacceptable that these tests carry on nowadays. We have no right to make these animals suffer for our own interests. Over the next few weeks, we will tell you more about the alternatives worth considering to help people suffering with depression.

You can act by supporting PETA France’s petition which asks Sanofi to stop forced swimming tests, and by soliciting major universities on Twitter and French businesses who have participated in these tests in recent years:

A request for engagement

I am asking the @PierreFabre company to lobby against forced swimming tests – rodents are not laboratory equipment! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

I am asking the @activinside company to lobby against forced swimming tests – rodents are not laboratory equipment! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

I am asking the @GustaveRoussy company to lobby against forced swimming tests – rodents are not laboratory equipment! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

Development of alternative methods

I am asking @InsermIDF to lobby against forced swimming tests at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Paris and to develop alternative methods! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

I am asking @INSB_CNRS and @Inserm to lobby against forced swimming tests and to develop alternative methods! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

I am asking @IBPS_Paris to lobby against forced swimming tests and to develop alternative methods! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

Research on prevention

I am asking @NCMagendie to lobby against forced swimming tests and to favour research on the prevention of depression! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

I am asking @unistra to lobby against forced swimming tests and to favour research on the prevention of depression! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

I am asking @UnivParisSaclay and @InsermIDF to lobby against forced swimming tests and to favour research on the prevention of depression! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

Development of serious training in psychology

I am asking @AgenceRecherche to no longer support forced swimming tests and to support the development of training in psychology deserving of the 21st century! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

I am asking @ APHP to no longer support forced swimming tests and to support the development of training in psychiatry deserving of the 21st century! #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting #AnimalTesting https://bit.ly/3T5XLv1 via @onevoiceanimal

This article is the third in a series of five on forced swimming:

 

  1. Electric shocks and forced swimming in France in 2022
  2. Forced swimming: footage
  3. Forced swimming: the businesses moving forward and the industry that resists
  4. Forced swimming: other approaches are possible
  5. Forced swimming: a long-term battle (to come)

Translated from the French by Joely Justice