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A protest too far

Intimidation cannot be justified

Animal rights protesters are fully entitled to protest in public about activities they find repugnant and to withdraw their money from banks whose loan policies they find distasteful. What they do not have the right to do is to take the law into their own hands and to threaten or intimidate those people - the majority, as it happens - who do not share their views. Tony Blair rightly emphasised yesterday that activists should not be able to force legitimate research companies such as Huntingdon Life Science out of business, or put pressures on them to move abroad (which in any case will not solve the problem for the activists, but merely move it elsewhere). Mr Blair pointed out that this is a legitimate industry on which thousands of jobs depend. The government is also right to take a strong stand on the need for scientific research and the importance of keeping it in this country. The prime minister was speaking as demonstrators were continuing to protest outside branches of the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose subsidiary, NatWest, is negotiating an extension to a £22.5m loan in order to fund HLS's research activities.

Of course, in an ideal world, it would be nice not to experiment with animals. In an ideal world it might also also be nice not to kill animals to provide food. But in terms of practical living, experiments on animals are regarded by most people as an acceptable price to pay for curing illness and extending life itself. There are not many known cases of protestors refusing to take life-saving drugs resulting from experiments in the laboratory. Research on animals has already proved vital in making advances in treating cancer, heart problems, diabetes, lung diseases and Parkinson's. If every drug used in everyday life carried a label "tested on animals", it would bring home to people the importance of work like this. Researchers have to get permission to conduct experiments with animals, which have been taking place in this country under strict controls for over 70 years, with only occasional scandals. Mostly, these experiments involve very little, if any, pain because the subjects are "sacrificed" - to use scientists' favourite euphemism for death- before they have had a chance to suffer actual pain.

HLS gets through about 75,000 animals a year, of which 87% are mice and rats, as a result of government legislation that requires every new medicine to be tested on rodents and on a non-rodent species before being given to humans. The deaths, though regrettable, must be set against the huge number of animals - from sheep to cats - in the world that would not exist at all but for the needs and activities of human beings. Domesticated animals outnumber animals in the wild by more than 10 to one. Some of them are then used to test medicines that enhance our lives and, quite often, the lives of animals themselves, including pets. It has to be admitted that the process involved is not particularly kind to animals; but neither is it inhumane, and the benefit to mankind far outweighs the damage caused by the means that inevitably have to be used.

Official figures show that in 1999 there were 1,200 reports of animal rights attacks causing an estimated £2.6m damage to property. The government is right to try to strengthen the law against the actions of maverick activists. As a nation, we accept that demonstrations against abuses of human rights should be peaceful and humane. Nothing less should be tolerated from animal rights protestors, who must expect the full weight of the law to be used against them if and when they choose to break it.