Letter: BSE animal experiments

Letter: BSE animal experiments

YOUR report ("Thousands of animals to be infected in BSE experiment", 4 April) uncovering a pounds 150m Ministry of Agriculture laboratory research programme into BSE, laid stress on the perceived threat to the research by animal rights protesters. If attention had been paid to the warnings of animal campaigners in the first place there would be no BSE crisis. The disease, in simple terms, is a consequence of over-intensification.

Animals are already the victims of BSE, hundreds of thousands having contracted it and many more "culled" and incinerated in case they do. To subject thousands more to traumatic lab experiments is not only a grotesque further insult but will produce nothing of value to human beings in the way of scientific data. The only reliable "model" of spongiform encephalopathy in human beings is homo sapiens.

ANDREW TYLER

Director

Animal Aid

Tonbridge, Kent