Posted by Kite under blog's category : Animal welfare & alternatives

In his blog, Richard Dawkins makes a thoughtful case for not assuming there is any relationship between feeling pain and the complexity of an organism's nervous system.

'Would you expect a positive or a negative correlation between mental ability and ability to feel pain? Most people unthinkingly assume a positive correlation, but why?'

While accepting his central point, that simpler organisms can feel pain, I don't (fully) accept his conclusion.

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Posted by Kite under blog's category : Animal welfare & alternatives

Smallpox Through Time won the Secondary Learning Category at the 2010 Children's BAFTAs and we're happy to award the site with this month's Wednesday Winner Web Award.

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Posted by Zebedee under blog's category : Animal welfare & alternatives

Our attention was drawn this week to a relatively new European initiative called AXLR8, a consortium which aims to accelerate progress in developing alternatives to animals for safety testing. It has just released a 300-page progress report detailing achievements in replacing and reducing (two of the 'three Rs') animals in research and testing.

Alternative Testing Strategies Progress Report 2010 runs to 300 pages; its content is quite technical and it includes realistic recommendations from a scientific panel. It explores approaches that may reduce or replace animals, including the use of embryonic stem cells to create heart tissue for medicines testing and computer programs that can predict the effect of a medicine in the body. It also discusses technologies that are already widely used, such as robotic pre-screening of potential medicines.

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Posted by Cat under blog's category : Animal welfare & alternatives

If there is one thing that anti-vivisection campaigns are good at, it's providing vivid imagery. Unfortunately, the striking images they use can often be inaccurate, out of date, or obtained from countries where animal welfare takes very low priority. That's why at Understanding Animal Research, we think it's important to set the record straight, and provide images and video that show what animal facilities really look like.

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