Using animals for various medical tests is an inhuman practice. It also goes against the Indian ethos of ahimsa
The European Union is reported to have banned sale of cosmetics, including products from India, which have been tested on animals. The United States' Food and Drug Administration also does not require such tests. But the Bureau of India Standards' draft requires two tests on animals. India has indeed come a long way from its glorious past, when sages and prophets preached ahimsa and compassion, and the Advatic view of oneness of life, to its brutal, fissiparous present. Unceasing hype about economic growth and development targets cannot conceal the moral decline.
Different arms of the Government today seem to be working at cross purposes. The Union Ministry of Health is reported to have revived its plan to breed animals for tests. This would entail setting up the Rs 400 crore National Animal Resource Facility for Biomedical Research in Genome Valley in Hyderabad.
NARF-BR would provide animals to pharmaceutical companies and research centres for experiments to facilitate medical advancement. Currently, such testing is confined to small creatures such as rodents at the Central Drug Research Institute in lucknow and National Institute of Nutrition in Hyderabad. Companies resort to testing new drugs in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. But with the proposed facility breeding horses, monkeys and dogs (beagles), animal trials can be conducted here before the drugs or technologies are marketed.
While this effectively proves that humans and animals are at par, the move seeks to undo the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests' ban last April on dissection and tests on animals. The guidelines, framed at the behest of the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments and Animals, constituted under Section 15 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (1960), were sent to University Grants Commission, Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Pharmacy Council of India and the Medical Council of India. They were directed to stop live animals' dissection and experiments in universities, colleges, research institutes, hospitals and laboratories. Instead, they were advised to take recourse to computer simulation, mannequin models, CDs and other options. It was acknowledged that animals were subjected to unwarranted cruelty. The field of new molecular research was exempted from the ban.
Modern man in his supreme arrogance clearly believes that he is master of all he surveys, and that all natural phenomena and living creatures exist for his benefit. This attitude underlies the soulless utilitarian doctrine that spurred colonialism, and in consequence, promoted exploitation of subjugated people and decimation of nature and wildlife. Its spillover, via neo-liberal reforms, into this century has led to widespread destruction of environment and wildlife, and displacement of people by mega projects that are justified on grounds of high growth and progress. Whether quality of life improves is doubtful. Since everything on earth is seen to exist for the human predator's needs, species considered inferior are hounded, hunted, tortured, maimed, brutalised and devoured.
Tragically for India, the advent of British rule heralded the hunting of majestic carnivores and other animals almost to the point of extinction, as an aristocratic sport. The ruling class even before had engaged in hunting but never on the scale of butchery, perpetrated under the Raj. Cheetahs were wiped out, and tigers, lions, leopards and other jungle denizens trailed as in fox hunts, that cowardly sport. Native satraps and functionaries were the eager accomplices of colonial administrators in this gruesome exercise. The timeless ethos of reverence for life, central to Indic civilisation, was thus negated. Along with this, cattle and other livestock, so useful as draught animals and for other farming purposes, were diverted to slaughter houses because meat-eating was encouraged as the key to a supposedly healthy, protein-based diet and a sign of sophistication. Other derivatives such as bones and skins also spelt profit. Use of animals in medical experiments, integral to western medicine, led to their further devaluation.
Free India's rulers perpetuated these policies, evident in Government providing subsidies for setting up slaughter houses and meat exports. It was most conspicuous in the area of health, with policy-makers capitulating to pressures exerted by the global pharmaceutical industry to accord allopathy a preeminent position. The medical knowledge garnered over several millennia, contained in Ayurveda, Siddha Ayurveda, yoga, Unani, Naturopathy and esoteric spiritual regimens, was eclipsed by the overriding focus on the western medical regimen. Gaining admission into a medical college and migrating to a wealthy country or setting up practice here made allopathy the most lucrative system of medicine, meriting reservations for select categories in State-funded institutes.
Indigenous healing systems came to be labelled ‘alternative therapies', their efficacy suspect because they precluded animal experiments, and had minimal reliance on machines and invasive technology. These were compassionate systems, hinging on right diet, action and lifestyle; and often succeeded where surgical skills and costly high-potency procedures and drugs failed. But for sceptical temperaments, they epitomised native mumbo-jumbo.