So essentially you can create mice here that glow in the dark.
Yes, of course.
Of course.
No animal industry attracts more criticism, provokes more outrage, than research.
[Ricky Gervais] 93% of all experiments that work
on animals then fail - and are dangerous - on humans.
[Sarah Champion] Almost two thirds of people want to see a plan to phase out animal experiments.
Despite an acknowledgement that scientists need to be more open about their work …
Cows don't fart very much.
Another myth shattered.
It’s a world they are still wary of showing.
I think you're taking me down a path I don't want to go.
Previously we’ve looked at animals collectively …
They’re group animals, if one gets ill, they probably are all feeling under the weather.
But what happens when we begin to focus on the individual?
Who are Fifi's friends? Is she friends with Spot? Is she friends with Curtis?
And can our evolving understanding of sentience change how we treat these animals?
We like to think that we're above a lot of animals.
I'm above this one, literally.
[Jane Goodall] All animals matter. Every animal is an individual.
Just as every human being is an individual.
My first visit was to the frontline of the animal
sentience debate, to meet the invertebrates at a cephalopod lab.
Wow, what is this behaviour?
Sometimes it's for attention.
Obviously we don't know exactly what they're thinking.
They squirt water a lot throughout the day.
Emily Sullivan looks after 35 cuttlefish at the Marine Biological Association,
which supports studies from marine climate change to physiology and behaviour.
Cephalopods are enjoying a bit of a moment, at the moment.
Yeah.
How confident are you in their sentience?
Pretty confident.
Pretty.
Yeah. Give a percentage.
Very confident. 95? or above?
We know they have pain receptors, it's been shown in science for a long time,
and they definitely avoid painful situations.
Is the term sentience problematic in some ways?
People can sometimes interpret that as not just,
ability to feel pain, but also sense of self-awareness,
and that is more of a grey area because that's obviously a lot harder to measure,
as it is with people.
They do express themselves so we can learn
from their behaviour, they change colour to camouflage.
They also change colour to communicate.
Often when they come to the surface it's to see what's happening,
which I think is what he’s doing now.
A lot of what people don't like about kept animals is this idea that you remove their agency
and you remove their ability to make free choices.
And the great thing about seeing animals
in the wild is that they are free to do as they please.
That's one of the reasons that we feed them live food,
we give them as many options as possible.
We kind of observe them, give them more
of what they like and less of what they don't like.
And what they certainly do like, for breakfast, is shrimp.
The hardest part is catching the shrimp.
Oh right. So we're not too worried about
the shrimp's capacity to feel pain in the next five minutes or so?
Obviously these are all invertebrates, but there's a huge difference between their sense
of awareness and ability to feel pain.
Basically it's just the food chain.
It's what the shrimp would normally be subject to.
But it's a different set up in the tank because there's no escape at all, right?
Yeah, you're right. There isn’t. And it's a difficult subject.
But these guys, extremely fussy, will only eat live food.
Me too.
If we didn’t, then they would starve.
So if you aim for the ones on the bottom, it tends to be a little bit easier,
and they are a little bit bigger on the bottom.
If you pop them in and see, sometimes they’re a bit slow
to respond and sometimes they go for it right away.
Didn’t stand a chance.
With the inclusion of marine invertebrates like octopus,
lobsters and crabs being debated in parliament’s animal sentience bill,
the ethical argument around their welfare is also set to evolve.
Is there any danger that your research here will be made harder by some of the bills
that are about to be passed?
We do think they should have more protection.
But it also needs to be recognised that the only way
we can learn more about them to protect them effectively
is if we can continue to study them.
Our use of animals realistically can't be ended because they're everywhere and we're everywhere.
And it's not physically possible for us to distance
ourselves from nature because we rely on it.
We are nature.
Exactly. We've come from it.
We can't survive without it.
And I think the next couple of years will sort of determine which path we start to take in terms
of how we treat animals, how we interact with them and the impact that we have.
Human beings are very different to all the other animals,
we're different, but the same, we're special but we're not.
People like to look for distinctions between animals and humans,
whether that's to justify how we use animals or just to sort of understand how we fit
in the world with nature.
And if we start to change that and say, well,
sentience is no longer something that distinguishes us,
that can cause a lot of people to be looking for answers and looking for other ways to
define a human
as opposed to another type of animal, you know?
In 2020 the UK carried out 2.88m scientific procedures on living animals.
The overwhelming majority of these animals were mice.
Mice are particularly unlucky, aren't they,
because they're so well suited to it?
They're easy to breed and they're quick to breed and they're easy to store.
We should always use the right species for the right research.
It's just for a lot of genetic research, the mouse fulfils that.
The Medical Research Council’s mouse Genetics
Institute is home to 50,000 of the rodents at any one time.
Bred with different genetic mutations modelled on human conditions like Parkinson’s and dementia,
they hope to predict disease and stop it in its tracks.
Because they are so different to humans,
Yes.
You can only extract a certain amount of information.
And there have been numerous examples of drugs that have worked in animals
and then have not worked in humans.
Yeah absolutely, and that's the case, I think,
because of the amount of information we knew about them.
And I think times are changing very much.
Lots of drugs have failed, but without a doubt, without using the mouse to alter genes,
we wouldn't know what the majority of genes did.
You can say, look, here we're looking at trying to cure dementia,
but when you look at animal research as a whole,
a lot of people might think of putting lipstick on a kitten.
That's why we run open days and that's why we go out to schools.
And that's why we talk very openly about our ethical review process.
That's many, many moons ago that anybody was allowed to do that.
People don't necessarily know that.
No, they don't. But that starts a conversation that you can correct.
Will it be a point at which we don't test on animals at all?
Yes, all of us believe there will be without a doubt.
But I don't think it's going to be a day where we just close.
I think it's going to be a slow move into, as we can replace, we do replace.
If there’s a red disc it means there’s mice on test there and you can’t necessarily enter.
So there's a mouse under anaesthetic lying on the bottom.
Wow. The vulnerability of the mice is really obvious in a test like this, right?
Yeah, like we're completely responsible for them.
So we have to really make sure we're following all the protocols,
make sure it's not suffering any adverse effects from the anaesthetic.
It’s quite uncommon, but it's not never.
So we have to keep a close eye on everything.
Once the realm of science fiction, genetic engineering allows us to create chimeras,
where the DNA of a mouse embryo is modified with DNA
generated in the lab, sometimes from entirely different species.
So this is a Chimera.
Wow. It's like David Bowie.
It must be hard not to get an attachment to some of these animals.
It is hard. It's part of the job. We are all fond of them.
But a lot of the mice are quite similar, and some of them are very distinctively different.
Yeah, it is difficult.
And we have lots of open conversations about, you know, when you kill animals,
how upsetting that is.
We cull them by breaking their necks.
We do it manually because we think…
Manually.
Manually, with your fingers.
And what is the value of doing it that way?
It's very quick, something like carbon dioxide ...
Yeah.
Takes time.
There's evidence that it's very unpleasant for them,
whereas these animals are in their home cage,
they’re out of their home cage like
we’re normally going to handle them, and then they’re dead.
And it's a very quick process.
When you've got 50,000 animals, you get used to it, perhaps.
I don't think any of us really get used to it.
It's part of the job, and so everybody needs to be trained to do it.
Is there a paradox here that they're so well suited
to do these tests because they're so similar to humans in many ways.
Yet in terms of rights, they are poles apart?
These animals do have rights not just by the laws, they’re protected by our own ethics as well.
We want every experiment to count.
We want every animal to be treated in the best way possible
and that the suffering on every animal, to be minimised.
And that's what we aim towards.
And when people say we're playing God with some of this stuff?
Well you have to believe in God then, don’t you?
Not all animal research takes place in a lab, or is focussed on finding cures for human illness.
It looks very much just like a farm.
It is a farm.
But it's not just a farm.
These are commercial farm cows.
These are research.
The only difference here is each cow has its own trough.
Right.
We could feed every cow a different diet
and look at how that diet impacts on the performance
of the animal and the quality of the product, milk,
that the animal is producing.
Here at Reading University’s Centre for Dairy Research,
much of the work looks at the environmental impact of agriculture.
There's a lot of interest in dietary supplements to reduce methane emissions at the moment.
We've done work on things like seaweed.
This is a respiration chamber, which is essentially
an air conditioned room that we house one animal in for up to six days.
Wow.
The air is pumped in and then sampled out through
these pipes where we're measuring the concentration of oxygen,
carbon dioxide and methane that flows through.
We do select cows for this, so we reject
a certain number of cows just because they don't settle.
This is where the individual cow is really important.
Yeah, they lose a bit of social interaction when they're in here,
and that's a compromise of making these sorts of accurate measurements.
The respiration chambers are just one example of the studies done on farm animals,
which also include attempts to improve the nutritional quality of their feed.
Fistulation is a more established procedure,
where a cannula is surgically fitted to allow access
to the cow’s rumen, gateway to the digestive system.
Do you see them mostly as a farm animal
or more as a research animal because of the extra stuff
that they're being asked to do?
We tend to look at animals here as farm animals, research has very little impact on the animal.
Is that true of the fistulated cows as well?
Any cow with fistulates, yes, that would be exactly the same. Yeah.
Do you have any at the moment?
I can't go that way. That's …
You’re not allowed to show it?
Well, because part of the remit of working
with these animals is to refine the techniques we use
to make their experience better, reduce the amount of animals
we use and replace the animals, if we can,
with other ways of research.
So the fistulated technique, it's not of relevance to what we do today.
But are there cows that have that here?
There might be one or two left.
How we treat animals and manage the research it's down to us.
There's a lot of scrutiny.
You've got to have a good reason to do the work in the first place,
you've got to do it well and if we don't meet those obligations,
the authority to do the work can be taken away.
Cows down here as well.
Yeah, there's cows everywhere. We have nearly 2,000.
In total? 2,000 cows!
You mentioned the fistulates, there’s one there in that group.
But there’s another one there.
There's two or three, at one time it was a core research tool,
these are the last ones we have.
I guess the issue with it is that it looks like it probably
at some point if not now, caused
that animal some degree of pain and suffering.
It's done under anaesthetic, once the procedure is stable,
then I don't think there's any further discomfort to the animal.
We manage the research animals to try not
to impact too much on the lifetime experience of the animal.
Yeah, because there is the permanence of the fistulate, which cannot be ...
It can't be reversed.
The research here is not solely concentrated on cattle.
The most famous individual here at Reading is Fifi,
a llama that garnered headlines during the pandemic
for producing antibodies now being touted as a potential Covid-19 treatment.
How does naming an animal sort of change how we see them?
It helps the public identify with an animal, if you tell them what its name is.
But for some of the research here at Reading,
focus on the individual animal extends beyond their antibodies.
We've been largely looking at the behaviour of the group,
and we're increasingly moving away from that
because with the technologies that are starting
to come available we can start to look at that individual
and look at the choices that they make within their environment.
What is the ultimate goal of this type of research?
To answer those fundamental questions
about what choices those animals make and why they make them.
Because if we can understand that, then we can provide them with opportunities
to have agency over their own environment.
The more we know about what they are trying to achieve,
the more we can change and adapt and make the environment more suitable.
Our increasing understanding of animal sentience may be closing the gap between humans and animals,
while ever tighter regulations give hope that conditions will continue to improve.
But given the fundamental challenges that we face on both a personal and planetary level,
animal research will continue so long as the human need for it remains.