After an intense campaign by policymakers and animal rights groups, the Green Hill animal breeding firm closed its doors, having handed more than 2,500 dogs over to animal rights campaigners in line with the court ruling.

Activists – and plenty of ordinary tweeters who just love dogs – celebrated. If you almost never give much thought to animal research, a headline about dogs in Italy being saved rather than sacrificed looks like good news.

But could the Green Hill story prove to be a pyrrhic victory for animal rights campaigners?

A bit of background

The first thing to consider is how many dogs are used in animal research and why scientists have to use dogs at all.

Using dogs for cosmetics is illegal in Europe but limited use for medical purposes is permitted, under strict conditions.

Around 21,000 dogs were used in European research, according to figures from 2008. While rats and mice are the most commonly used animals in laboratories, larger mammals such as dogs are needed for certain kinds of tests. Many of these are required by EU regulations  to ensure that medicines are safe and effective.

In the event that all research on dogs were to end, much of the current work scientists do in search for new cures of heart disease, cancer and dementia would reach a cul-de-sac.

That might be bad news for human and animal health research but what about laboratory animals themselves?

NIMBY

Europe has the strictest animal welfare standards in the world. If European countries were to become openly hostile to this kind of medical research, would it simply move elsewhere?

Is it unfair to suggest that the campaign against Green Hill is a case of ‘Not In My Back Yard’ – or NIMBY as we like to say.

And are European protests simply going to shift research to jurisdictions where standards are less rigorous?

For pragmatic animal welfare advocates – and dog lovers across Europe – the threat to animal research in Europe presents a dilemma: would pushing dog breeding out of Europe do more harm than good?

European society wants to take care of family pets, as it does for the rest of the family. Today, it’s normal for household animals to be attended to by specialized doctors, receive treatments, medicines and vaccines. Our pets are undergoing complicated operations and even cancer therapies to improve their quality of life. All this was made possible thanks to years of medical research, with animals.

In The Netherlands, 65% of dog research and 90% of cat research is to advance the health and safety of cats and dogs. 20% of all animal testing is for the development of veterinary drugs and vaccines. Furthermore medicine destined for animals must first be tested on healthy animals before being used in animal patients.

An example of a new treatment that has been made possible through research with dogs is gene therapy for people with impaired vision or who are blind. Briard dogs with Leber’s disease are born blind. Ten years ago research began with naturally blind Braird dogs to see if their vision could be improved. After successful results, gene therapies have also been performed on humans and as well as blind dogs. Watch this video “RPE65 Gene therapy” illustrating the results of gene therapy on a dog after one of its eyes was treated.

Even though the number of cats used for research is a lot less than dogs, there is an ongoing need for more research and better understanding of this species, be it pedigree or house cat, because more are kept as pets. Moreover, cats get their own kinds of illnesses like flu and Distemper.

So if we ban the use of cats and dogs in experiments we run the risk of not being able to protect them with new vaccines and medicines. It could potentially impact the development of some new medicines for humans. For example dogs are mostly used in research for heart and vascular disease in humans. However contentious that maybe, we shouldn’t ignore how veterinary developments are greatly benefiting from medical advances in humans.

Running parallel to this point, as we strive to improve the health of our animal companions, domestic animals are starting to suffer from similar modern illnesses found in humans. It’s not uncommon these days for dogs and cats to develop lifestyle diseases such as diabetes or heart disease, brought on through poor diet and lack of exercise, quite likely reflecting the owners’ own habits. Read the zebra fish post about heart research to learn more about modern diseases.

Now with these extra facts on the table bringing the consequences closer to home, it would be interesting to ask those 57,000 Dutch citizens if they still want to ban animal research.

Related content:

Neil Parish MP: balancing science and ethics in a political environment

What’s driving the increase in animal research?

Misconceptions: Animals are kept in appalling living conditions