Warfare experiments involve nerve agents, chemical or biological weapons, even simulated blasts – and all can involve live animals. It’s as shocking and deplorable as it sounds.
Who are Porton Down?
Porton Down, home to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, is a government research facility located in Wiltshire and run by the Ministry of Defence and Public Health England.
According to its government website, Porton Down has been ‘active in developing effective countermeasures to the constantly evolving threat posed by chemical and biological weapons. To help develop effective medical countermeasures and to test systems, we produce very small quantities of chemical and biological agents’. It admits to using animals, claiming ‘safe and effective protective measures…could not, currently, be achieved without the use of animals’.
Chemical and biological agents can take different forms, but the one most people are familiar with is nerve agents or gases. Typically, animals are exposed to these poisonous substances and then attempts are made to ‘remedy’ the effects of the poison.
Nerve agents are highly toxic substances that work by binding to an enzyme in the body, stopping that enzyme from working and causing mental impairment, breathing problems, seizures, coma and death.
A paper published nearly twenty years ago casts doubt on the reliability of data gathered from harming guinea pigs with nerve agents in order to test a class of drugs designed to help humans. The authors point out that ‘some potential [drugs] that are suitable for humans may be dismissed based upon their poor efficacy in guinea pigs’.
Porton Down was founded just over a century ago, in 1916. As the oldest chemical warfare research establishment in the world, it has been under the scrutiny of animal groups, journalists and concerned members of the public.
Just 3 years after Animal Aid was founded, our supporter magazine, Outrage, shared details of a march in Salisbury in 1980 to raise awareness of what was taking place just down the road, at Porton Down. Several thousand people attended, including our very own founder, Jean Pink. When the director of Porton Down would not accept Jean’s wreath of remembrance, for all the animals who had suffered and died there, the wreaths were laid on the ground.
A later issue of Outrage detailed one particular warfare experiment that happened at Porton Down: exposing monkeys to a nerve gas known as soman. We reported that the monkeys were then given further drugs to try to counteract the effects of the nerve gas.
It is scandalous that, 4 decades on, nothing much has changed at Porton Down – animals continue to be the victims of warfare experiments.
Take action for animals in laboratories
Using animals in science is cruel and outdated, but there is something especially unsettling about warfare experiments. Take action today for better science tomorrow.