Until recently, when it became a bit of a handful and they gave it away, Frank Bonner and his family had a pet dog - a beagle. Nothing unusual about that. Except that Dr Bonner is the head of science and technology at Cambridgeshire-based Huntingdon Life Sciences, which for the sake of commercial research conducts experiments on, and then kills, around 750 beagles a year. The pet, however, was not one of these. Its breed, said Dr Bonner, was "pure and utter coincidence". But at the end of the working day, Dr Bonner and HSDL's hundreds of scientists, technicians and administrators emerge from behind their shiny razor wire, run the gauntlet of anti-vivisectionists shouting abuse, and go home to their pets.
In all, HLS gets through about 75,000 animals a year: 87% mice and rats, 8% fish, 3% birds, 1% dogs, 0.6% monkeys, and smaller numbers of other animals, including cats.
Animal rights campaigners, who have made HLS the target of one of their most successful campaigns, are unlikely ever to be persuaded that these people love animals. But they insist they do.
"To listen to some people outside, it's as if we love nothing better than torturing animals, as if we get up in the mornings rubbing our hands and saying 'Oh goody, we're going to torture animals today'," said one HLS scientist, who, like most staff, spoke on condition of anonymity.
"We are working with animals, carrying out procedures on them, experimenting on them - but we play with them, too. In the end, of course, you give the animals a terminal injection and hold them while they are put to sleep."
The real hypocrites
The scientists went on: "To me, it's much better having people that love animals and care for animals carrying out these procedures (which government and society thinks are necessary) than people who are callous towards them."
To the animal rights movement, led in this cause by SHAC, for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, this is hypocrisy. In their view, no real animal lover would have anything to do with animal experiments. They maintain that the shocking 1997 undercover video of dogs being abused by HLS workers was not, as the company said, an isolated incident, rendered impossible by changed procedures, but a true glimpse of what still happens inside.
To the beleaguered HLS staff, who said they were as shocked and sickened by what was revealed on the video as the wider public, society, and government, were the real hypocrites.
Society wanted the cures promised by the biotech revolution. Government wanted to make sure the new treatments were safe, and enforced laws that demanded every new medicine be tested on rodents and a non-rodent species before it was given to humans. Yet, HLS staff complained, the government had failed to speak out publicly in their defence since they came under attack from animal rights activists.
The campaign to shut HLS down, which has persuaded institutional and individual investors, including the Labour party, to sell shares in the firm, has its darker side. In May, unknown persons set fire to four cars belonging to HLS employees. "All the attacks took place in the same village, within five minutes of each other," said Huntingdon's managing director, Brian Cass. "It's really, really lucky nobody was injured."
Two months earlier, in an attack not previously made public, another staff member had his car torched. He was away at the time, and his wife was alone in their home in a Yorkshire hamlet. "The first thing she knew about it was when the tyres exploded. She rushed downstairs and all she could see was a sheet of flame," said the HLS worker.
Another HLS employee said he and his wife had received mail threatening to kill them and their children. "We had packages delivered tricked up to look like bombs," he said. "We've had to call the bomb squad three times. We've had windows smashed, and 30 people outside the house during my son's first birthday party shouting and screaming abuse.
"I've been a member of the Labour party for many years. I've been very disappointed by their attitude. It's not been 'we don't like what you do'. It's been 'we completely understand what you do, we support you, but don't expect us to support you in public'. One MP said they didn't feel able to support us in public because they feared an attack on their constituency office. From an elected MP, I find that cowardly."
The Home Office minister Mike O'Brien visited HLS recently, and the government may take legal steps to give animal researchers better protection. But figures released yesterday exposed the dilemma for a government that wants to be seen as both animal-friendly and science-friendly.
Although the overall number of animal experiments fell slightly, the race to use the new genetics to develop drugs showed in a leap in use of GM lab mice and bigger animals like monkeys, cats and dogs. Dog experiments went up 20%, to 8,185.
In Huntingdon's massive dog house, which has space for almost 1,200 dogs but this week had about 480, the young beagles live in long, bare, brightly lit concrete rooms, divided up into roofless steel pens.
They each get 4.5 square metres of space. They are exercised each day in the long aisle between the pens. For much of the day, gates are opened between the pens and the dogs get to pair off for play. Sometimes staff play with the animals; there are plastic toys in the sawdust on the floor.
After a period of acclimatisation, the dogs are fed medicines and other substances under test - often in the same tablet form, with the same sort of dose, that humans might take. At the end of the study, the beagles are killed and autopsies are done to see what effect the drugs have had on their inner organs.
Society's decision
This week, 17 substances were being tested on the dogs: six anti-cancer drugs, four to treat heart disease, three designed to treat diseases of the central nervous system including one for Parkinson's disease, two for diabetes, one for lung disease, and one for a veterinary medicine.
HLS staff said they would like to see all medicines, from paracetamol to the most obscure and costly new drug, carry the label: Tested on animals. "People would suddenly realise how much of their everyday life was dependent on this," said one scientist. "It would make people more aware of why we do the work we do."
"Can you remember the last time a government minister, or one of the regulators who demands these tests, stood up and said that the government insists animal testing is carried out?" asked Mr Cass.
"People like us are at the sharp end, bearing the brunt of attacks and public attention. All of our work is for government requirements, and we feel the government should acknowledge that.
"Society has to make the decision. If we want to see new drugs being introduced, but don't want to see animals used for tests, then we have to accept a high degree of risk that things won't work out."
Not all of HLS's work is for UK government medicine requirements. Some is for overseas companies trying to satisfy their regulators; some for weedkillers and fertilisers; some for food additives. One test last year was for a company which wanted to replace long-standing synthetic preservatives in food with a "natural" alternative.
Anti-vivisectionists pointed to such experiments as examples of unnecessary testing. Even new drugs, they argued, could be checked in the test tube and by computer modelling. HLS scientists countered that the technology, while improving, was not yet ready.
"I can foresee a time when it will not be necessary to do these studies," said an HLS researcher. "In a few decades, it may well be that animal experimentation will go away forever. The difficulty is that at the moment, the non-animal tests are not robust enough, or acceptable to governments, to prove new medicines are safe."
