Animal wrongs
The latest development in the long-running battle of the animal rights activists against Huntingdon Life Sciences has seen the company managing to find financial backing from an unnamed US source to replace the Royal Bank of Scotland just in time to avoid going out of business. The activists had run a campaign against the bank for backing the testing company, and succeeded in panicking it into withdrawing its support.
The activists are now not only saying they will try and track down the US backers, but will also move on to attacking the pharmaceutical companies themselves, notably Glaxo SmithKline. The pharma industry is in danger of seeing the vast amounts of adverse publicity the cosmetics industry faced.
Most of the recent bad publicity has been targeted at, and absorbed by, the contractors, notably Huntingdon. But if the protestors are shifting their attention to the pharma companies themselves, then the industry will have no option but to defend itself.
The general public is easily swayed by dramatic images — witness the pictures of animal testing, most of which are extremely old, that are promulgated by the activists. But they need to be presented with a balanced view — and at the moment they are only seeing the activists' side. Perhaps fighting fire with fire would be the most successful way in the short term: countering pictures of animal testing labs with ones of small children, accompanied by taglines saying that, without animal testing, the drugs that saved them from, say, leukaemia, would never have been developed.
This is a publicity battle the pharmaceutical companies really must win if they are to continue to be able to research and develop improved drugs for common diseases, and new therapies for incurable ones. It is going to be many years before it is possible to replace animals in drug testing completely, and it has to be made clear to the responsible public that there is no current alternative if they want cures for cancer, AIDS and heart disease. Maybe if the industry had actively stood up for Huntingdon in the first place, it would not find itselffacing the bad publicity it is now.
In a worst-case scenario, the pharma companies could be forced to pull their r&d effort out of the UK. The regulators require all drugs to be tested on animals, so the tests would still be taking place, but maybe in a location where they are not as strictly controlled. And this, surely, would be counterproductive for the activists.