Dr Michael Morris Animal welfare writer nzchas.canterbury

Another Daffodil Day has come and gone, and while the Cancer Society undoubtedly does some good work in supporting those afflicted with cancer, one bone of contention is the support they give to animal experiments.

Proponents of intrusive experimentation use emotive responses – parading sick people in wheel chairs who they tell us will leap up and run around if we only did more animal experiments, or proclaiming that 'it's your dog or your baby”.

The latter utterance conjures up images of the Angel of Death invading a suburban living room, pointing his scythe at the dog by the hearth and the baby in the cot and intoning with a maniacal laugh, 'choose which I take tonight”.

The truth is far more complex.

Cancer research is responsible for much of what MAF describes as 'very severe suffering” experiments, and if you pin them down, the best argument that even the most enthusiastic animal scientist will say is that this incredible suffering in the present may just possibly prevent someone from getting cancer in the future.

In the meantime, people continue to die from preventable diseases, including cancer, because funds are being diverted from much needed primary health care and health education, to ego-boosting and highly expensive research projects, usually involving inflicting severe suffering.

In 2009, 22,212 animals in New Zealand were subjected to 'very severe suffering”.

Most of these did not die for medical advancement, but for product testing, or agricultural research.

The latter being a means of extracting even more meat and milk from already overstressed farm animals for a society already so sated with animal protein that our health is suffering as a result.

Ironically, cancer is one of the effects of a diet high in animal protein.

A diet built on the suffering of animals not only in the laboratory but on the factory farm.

So we are in the position of harming our health through animal suffering, then convincing our policy makers that more animals must suffer to find a solution.

It is truly a case of the dog and the baby.