| Sentience | ||
| As a temporarily avid watcher of daytime television, my favourite programme has to be ‘Australian Border Force’. It looks at the efforts of the ‘Officers’ of that force to protect their country. Sometimes they are trying to keep out people who are trying to smuggle narcotics in or trying to get in to the country (often accompanied by a ‘minder’) in order to work in various nefarious activities. Sometimes though we see a clash of cultures causing the difficulty. Quite often people seem to want to bring foodstuffs in with them, obviously not trusting Australian cuisine. This is reminiscent of the early days of travel from the UK to Spain or France when many tourists, driving to their holiday destination, took with them enough food to last them for the entire holiday. But those going to Australia from Vietnam and its neighbouring countries take it to a whole new level. Weighed down with huge suitcases filled with the food they prefer, they completely ignore the regulations, those forbidding the import of so many of the delicacies which they do not want to be deprived of. At the same time, they reveal how very different our eating habits are. The last programme I saw featured a Vietnamese couple with the usual straining suitcase including banned items such as seeds, vegetables, cooked items and, particularly strange to me, 6kg of frog meat. How many frogs had to be sacrificed, and under what conditions, to produce such an amount of meat I don’t know. It wasn’t even meat on the bone. By coincidence, later in the week I was reading about mice in the UK. Not that we have taken to eating them. It is rather that, when it comes to scientific research into new drugs, they are its backbone - and many other parts of the body. Very often they are bred to have genetic defects which will produce illnesses from which we suffer, something done in order to try to uncover the underlying biochemical pathway. Others are normal mice given nasty illnesses in order to test drugs on them to see if they are effective and/or if they induce undesirable side-effects. But it seems that we care for our mice. Each university carrying out such research has an Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body (Awerb). For scientists planning animal experiments, this is the final hurdle. After convincing their university the science is worth doing, they have to convince their Awerb that it is worth the lives of animals. These committees are composed of lay people, academics, technicians and clinicians. As Tom Whipple, the science reporter of the Times explained, the researchers explain in what way mice help them understand a particular condition being researched. They will also need to justify the number of mice needed in order to go ahead. And, almost always, the mice will need to be killed in order to study them further. The committee’s job is to ensure that the research is “minimally burdensome to the animals”. The mice may, however, be less inconvenienced in the future. This week the government announced a new animal research strategy. It seems that thanks to 3D tissue models and AI, the goal is to stop using animals in science “in all but exceptional circumstances”. A step forward? Well, it sounds good, but, as The Times reported, the research community is very concerned. Researchers are unconvinced. “We are definitely not ready to abandon research with animals,” said Robin Lovell-Badge, from the world-leading Francis Crick Institute. The government was “forcibly and prematurely pushing this strategy”. A body is unimaginably complex. Drug researchers draw flow charts of metabolic pathways. No matter how much they are simplified, the result always looks impenetrable, with arrows going in all directions. And what about unknowns? What about the liver drug that unexpectedly affects the brain or a foetus, something not featuring in the 3D tissue models? They are, after all, models of only parts of the body, not the whole of it. “None of these alternative models can replicate the complexity of a whole animal,” said Charlotte Dean, from Imperial College London. Scientists have learnt to be wary of talking about the involvement of animals in the testing of medicines. Not that long ago police warned of a risk of violence from activists. If you think animal testing is always wrong then that’s a philosophically coherent argument. Albeit tricky if you get cancer. The protestors are also right to argue that animals are often deeply flawed models. What works in a mouse often fails in a person. That does not mean, however, that animal testing is therefore pointless, with the implication that two million mice died every year in Britain because researchers just didn’t care; that we just needed to deploy technology and we could avoid thinking about trade-offs. Hopefully the government plan will succeed, but it will certainly be some time in the future. And it won’t eliminate the use of animals in research. At best it may reduce the need for them in that research. Today, though, the trade-offs remain. When we take a drug, we should expect it to have been able to be developed because a researcher in a lab killed a mouse. But why mice? Well they breed very quickly and, although animals, they are not regarded as having a high degree of sentience. We judge that they are not really much aware of what’s going on in their lives. They are not thought to be particularly intelligent, nor to have any particular concept of their future or even of their own identity. Which takes us to the hot topic of octopus kebabs. A restaurant in London - ‘Pescobar’ - offers just such a delight. The restaurant receives the octopus from a supplier in Senegal. The meat which goes on the rotating skewer is fresh octopus, held together with fish gelatine, frozen and shipped over to Camden. This though is very far from being a fast-food joint. We are told that their head chef came from The Ivy Asia. He oversees the dish, adding the pitta bread from a local Israeli supplier, freshly baked and delivered daily. The octopus kebab is their most ordered dish - selling up to 1,400 on a busy day - alongside other seafood delights such as “Octodogs” (a brioche hot dog with an octopus tentacle instead of sausage), crunchy popcorn prawns and seafood platters. But I thought that it had now been established that octopuses (octopi?) are in fact very intelligent sea creatures. They are well able to solve problems using the distributed brain in their heads and tentacles and also pass the mirror test to show that they are self-aware. So is there an Awerb to ask whether the slaughter of these creatures is justified in terms of their contribution to science? Probably not. It is justified on the pragmatic ground that many people want to eat them, just as they eat frog meat, whether in Vietnam or in France. As I have mentioned previously, however, we now have the ‘Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022’. it was promoted behind the scenes by Boris Johnson’s then newly acquired wife. It required the formation of yet another committee - this time, one to consider “whether, or to what extent, the government is having, or has had, all due regard to the ways in which [any new government] policy might have an adverse effect on the welfare of animals as sentient beings. Recently, the definition of ‘sentient animals’ was extended to ‘cephalopod molluscs’ (octopus, squid, cuttlefish or nautilus) or ‘decapod crustaceans’ (lobster, crab, shrimp or prawn). The committee has to date issued 7 rather anodyne reports, broadly confirming that they have no problem with government policy. So far though no mention of the government line on octopus kebabs or octodogs, whether with or without prawns. And no mention yet of the resurgence from the 1960s of the prawn cocktail. And if shrimps should be protected because of their level of sentience, what of chicken nuggets? Are not chickens at least as sentient as a prawn? And what about ants? They live in colonies building structures and generally working for the good of the collective. Is that not a form of sentience? And yet we casually tread on any ant which lies in our path. We are amazingly inconsistent. Paul Buckingham |
||
|
|