VIVISECTION AT HOME

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 832, 28 November 1929, Page 10

VIVISECTION AT HOME

PAINLESS EXPERIMENTS

A Home Office return issued recently, shows that during 1928 there ! were 315,891 experiments on living animals, an increase of 22,589 on the previous year. The experiments with anaesthetics numbered 14,976, an increase of 1,105, while the minor experiments (mostly inoculations) without anaesthetic, totalled 300,915, an increase of 21,484. Of the operations performed under an anaesthetic 6,628 were carried out under a licence, which requires that the animal must be kept under an anaesthetic during the whole of the experiment, and must, if the pain is likely to continue after the effect of the anaesthetic has ceased or if any serious injury has been inflicted on the animal, be killed before it recovers from the influence of the anaesthetic. Discussing the antiseptic precaution taken the report states: “After the healing of the wounds the animals are. not necessarily, or even generally, In pain, since experiments involving the removal of important organs, including portions of the brain, may be performed without giving rise to pain after the recovery from the operation, and after the section of a part of the nervous system the resulting degenerative changes are painless.” Twenty licences during the year performed 34,180 experiments in the course of cancer investigations. Of these 443 were with anaesthetics and 38,737 minor, the latter being almost entirely inoculations into mice or exposure of animals to radiation.