02:58
A Clinical Skills Laboratory (CSL) is important for teaching surgical and medical skills to veterinary and medical students. Our recent article at http://rebrand.ly/2018/CSL (also at https://AndrewKnight.info) and summarised here, describes steps and considerations important during the establishment of a successful CSL, based on our experiences in establishing and directing the state of the art...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
09:57
Describes the use of animals within life and health sciences education, humane alternatives, and evidence concerning the educational effectiveness of humane teaching methods compared to harmful animal use.
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
09:47
Reviews the 3Rs – the Replacement, Reduction and Refinement of laboratory animal use. Key replacement examples include the use of structure-activity relationships and expert systems, cell cultures, the ‘human on a chip’, gene chips, and strategies to increase the predictivity and safety of human clinical trials. Key reduction examples include statistical calculation of sample sizes and internat...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
05:17
Can animal experiments help cure depression? Unfortunately not, because animal research contributes little to human medical developments in this field. Here, we summarise our studies of the contributions of different forms of research to advances in depression understanding and treatment. Our full papers may be found at https://rebrand.ly/2020/MDD-Front-Psych, https://rebrand.ly/2020/MDD-PLoS-O...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
04:44
Should we experiment on non-human primates (NHPs)? A short introduction to the harms and benefits of such research, and a call for greater protection of NHPs. Introduces our article: Carvalho, C., Gaspar, A., Knight, A., and Vicente, L. (2019). Ethical and scientific pitfalls concerning laboratory research with non-human primates, and possible solutions. Animals, 9(1), 12. https://www.mdpi.com/...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
09:56
Systematic reviews have clearly demonstrated the limited human clinical and toxicological utility of animal experiments. This presentation briefly summarises this evidence, and reviews the reasons for the poor human predictivity of animal models. These include inherent differences between humans and animals, further exacerbated by the ways in which we use them – particularly, the stressful labo...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
05:29
Reviews the numbers of animals used for scientific or educational purposes worldwide, and explores the main drivers of increasing use – greater use of genetically modified animals, and large-scale chemical testing programmes. Covers the most common species used, their sourcing, categories of use, and procedural invasiveness.
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
05:19
Summarises some major animal ethics theories, with a particular application to the killing and eating of animals. These include Peter Singer’s utilitarianism and Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights. In contrast, Rogen Scruton views pastoralist farming as a complex moral good, situated between the ‘evil’ extremes of intensive farming, and vegetarianism.
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
05:26
Summarises animal welfare concerns associated with the transport of animals by sea, air and land. The greatest concerns are associated with the sea transport of livestock from Australia. This is explored in some detail. Welfare problems include those caused by failure to eat during shipping, poor hygiene, crowding, disease, physical injuries, and heat stroke. Leading causes of death are summari...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
05:30
Summarises animal welfare concerns associated with commercial and recreational fishing, and fish farming. Topics include the ability of fish to feel pain, problems such as birth defects caused by genetic selection of farmed fish for rapid growth rates, barren and crowded fish farm environments, and stresses incurred during handling, transportation and slaughter. The slaughter of fish and crusta...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
05:32
Summarises animal welfare concerns associated with the farming of sheep and goats, in both developed and developing world environments. These include lameness, mastitis (inflammation of the udder) and painful husbandry procedures such as castration, tail-docking and mulesing. Animal welfare assessment is also reviewed.
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025
28:52
BBC1_Panorama, A Cow's Life The True Cost of Milk 14Feb22
Most of us drink cow’s milk, but are we paying enough for it? Panorama investigates the dairy industry to find out whether animal welfare is being compromised in the drive to keep milk prices low. The film features disturbing undercover footage of farmworkers abusing cows, while reporter Daniel Foggo speaks to farmers and vets about the...
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2025