A brief, brief post in the name of perspective. I like perspective, as I have discussed before.
Today there is a lot of coverage in the UK press of an increase in the numbers of animals used in science experiments. These statistics are released every year by the Home Office, which regulates animal experiments in Britain – very thoroughly and very tightly, I can say with confidence as a license holder. This year the number of procedures was 3.7 million. It’s gone up from 3.6 million. This is not a ‘disgraceful’ ‘huge rise’, dear Metro and Mail subeditors. It is a 3% increase which, if you exclude GM animals making babies, comes down to less than 1%. There are numerous other aspects to the numbers, nicely covered by Alok Jha for the Guardian, but the only thing I wanted to add was – yes – a dram of perspective.
A quick, crude breakdown of Britain's toll on the animal kingdom
There are numerous reasons this graph isn’t 100% accurate. We maim and kill animals for sundry other purposes which I haven’t looked up (hunting, petting, getting from A to B in wheeled metal boxes…) so the use of a pie chart is misleading – but if I make it a bar graph then the ‘science’ and ‘vermin’ bars are invisible to the naked eye. Furthermore, the numbers (apart from ‘science’ slice) are very approximate, and the 3.7 million figure itself is an overestimate because it is a count of ‘procedures’ and many lab animals undergo more than one – starting, if they are GM, with getting themselves born or hatched.
Long discussions can be had about the merits of using ‘this-isn’t-bad-because-look-over-there-that’s-worse’ as an argument, but that’s not even my aim. I’m not a vegetarian, so I’m a contributor to every piece of the pie chart.
I just think it’s useful to put things in perspective. I like perspective.
by jonathan
Yes, perspective is a very good thing indeed