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?

Read the Europe 2020 strategy and the Innovation Union policy and the message from EU policymakers is clear. Europe says it needs to be in the Premier League of scientific R&D, not just because research delivers solutions that help improve our lives, but because we want to develop and produce things that have value; things people in the US, Japan, China and elsewhere will buy from us.

Rhetoric vs reality

But what is the reality behind the rhetoric? And is Europe sending mixed signals about its support for research?

Last month the European Commission adopted a new regulation on clinical trials explicitly designed to make it easier to do research in the EU.

Just days later a court in Italy ordered the temporary closure of one of Europe’s leading dog-breeding facilities.

The move followed claims by animal rights groups that the Green Hill facility, a major supplier of animals for research use, was mistreating animals. The company flatly denies this. The judge granted the campaigners ‘custody’ of the animals and effectively cast a serious doubt over the future of the company.

Seeds of doubt

This raises questions about the future of dog breeding in Europe given the prominent role that the Green Hill facility played in the research landscape here, and the likelihood that other breeders will be unnerved by the incident.

And, crucially, it sows seeds of doubt too about how European policy is evolving in this area. A number of Italian politicians joined the campaign against Green Hill, tapping into an anti-research sentiment among some sections of their electorate.  

Would the human clinical trials that Europe has vowed to attract and keep be possible without animal research?

Would fewer of us consider enrolling in a trial to test the power of a new medicine if the drug had not been through safety checks on animals first?