You have been asked to “free the Oxford Two”. What are you doing about this?
Oxford University claim:
All our research using animals is conducted under the strict regulations laid down by the Home Office; this means that, once an animal has reached the end of a period of experiments, it must be humanely killed. For over ten years, the so-called “Oxford Two” provided information leading to valuable understanding of visual impairment caused by strokes or brain injuries – minimising the number of animals that needed to be used in this work. In line with Government regulations, they were humanely put down four years ago.
SPEAK’s response:
At five years old, these intelligent, sentient creatures underwent surgery at Oxford University. At five years old, their skulls were cut open and part of their brain was removed. They spent fifteen years imprisoned in a barren cage never feeling the sun, the wind or the rain on their face, never experiencing the natural world into which their forebears were born and were experimented on over and over again by their jailers. Without any respite, without any hope.
They were still being used ten years later in an experiment at the University funded by the Medical Research Council. It was not and is not an isolated incident. It is happening day in day out to hundreds of animals behind the walls of Oxford University.
Oxford University avows that the experiments carried out on these two animals provided invaluable information about visual impairment caused by strokes or brain injuries. A true comparative study COULD NOT take place as neither monkey suffered a stroke, both were brain-damaged under a surgical knife, and subjected to drug-altered states. No one case of brain damage can be identical, since it is dependant on the nuances within an individual’s original intellectual/performance capabilities prior to brain damage. The comparative studies carried out by researchers of the primates’ responses and those of a brain-damaged homo sapiens could not possibly be correlated; their “performance” under experimental conditions was superior to that of the human.