We’d like Cardiff University, to confirm whether it’s still conducting experiments on kittens and cats.
The last few days have seen a hillabaloo blow up after Wales Online revealed that kittens had their eyes sown shut or were kept in teh dark for up to 12 weeks before being killed. The results of the research were published in European Journal of Neuroscience but have attracted widespread critisism.
The university has attempted to defend its position saying the research is needed to understand lazy eye condition in children.
You would have thought if you were going to do research into Lazy eye in Children and young adults you would conduct your research on children who’d been opted into the research by their parents. But no. Not at Cardiff University. (Its only sarcasm..)
We had already noted Cardiff’s role in cat experiments when conducting a review of the numbers of experiements. The kitten experiments had already been documented.
We suggest prospective students boycott the university and go elsewhere.
It’s even more galling when you learn that the research was part funded by the Medical Research Council. That’s means that we (you, me) partly funded this experiment involving 31 cats/kittens.
Well not in my name thank you very much.
In the Daily Mail a spokesman for the University was quoted:
‘The University will always use alternative technology where it exists and only uses animals when absolutely necessary.
‘While a treatment for older children may be some time away, Cardiff University believes this research raises the prospect of markedly improving the sight of sufferers of this serious condition.’
A spokesman for the Medical Research Council, which part- funded the research from taxpayers’ money, said: ‘Our reviewers judged that this project proposal was worthwhile and of high quality, in the face of very strong competition for funding.’
People may remember that the same procedure on cats was at the centre of an animal-rights furore in the 1980s in which activists attacked Professor Colin Blakemore, of Oxford University, who was researching childhood blindness.
There are no happy endings here. All 31 cats were then anaesthetised and the activity in their brains and eyes was monitored to see how their vision had developed, before they were put down. While the men in their ivory towers may applaud their research others are commenting that the findings are not transferrable to people.
For example, BUAV’s veterinary adviser Dr Ned Buyukmihci said: ‘There are established methods of obtaining essentially the same information in a humane way from people.’
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