Right of Reply: Christine Orr

The research officer for the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection replies to Tuesday's editorial

THE MORAL difficulty of deciding "how much pain to allow" is faced by the government every time it receives an application for a licence to experiment on animals. The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 provides that the government must, in determining whether to grant a licence, weigh the prospect of animal suffering against the likely benefit of the research - the pain/benefit test.

Tests for cosmetic, tobacco and alcohol products are banned on the principle that the products are too trivial to merit the infliction of suffering on animals. But tests for such substances as household products and agricultural chemicals continue. Such tests can cause great suffering: one involves force-feeding groups of animals with different amounts of a test chemical in order to determine the dose which kills half of them.

The only other experiments banned are those involving great apes - their qualities allegedly make it "unethical to treat them as expendable for research". Yet these same qualities are also possessed by other primates, and thousands of experiments are carried out on them each year.

The BUAV would ban all animal experiments, as we believe the deliberate infliction of pain on animals is morally wrong. But it is argued that causing suffering to animals during experiments is justifiable because such tests are necessary to fight disease, despite the fact that a wealth of scientific information shows that animal experiments are misleading. Bear in mind that millions of animals have died in cancer research, yet a cure is as far away as ever.

All these animals suffer. An animal's pain is incalculable, the weighing of this pain abhorrent, and the only civilised course is an end to its deliberate infliction.