Every year the animal rights group Animal Aid mounts a publicity stunt called “Mad Science Awards”. They look increasingly desperate and decreasingly credible. The most recent, supposed to be for 2005, were actually announced last month and received no media coverage, so now Animal Aid is writing letters to local newspapers to try to drum up some interest. Not only that, but this year the group could only manage to find eight projects to criticise, in contrast with a dozen or so in previous years.

A couple of examples give a flavour. Animal Aid attempts to rubbish use of cats in migraine research: “the use of cats is particularly problematic in the study of pain, as it is difficult to monitor in this species of animal.” But a leading expert in pain research and consultant in neurology, who has introduced new and better treatments for disorders such as migraine and cluster headache, disagrees. He says that much of this came from his experimental animal work in rats and cats.

A “special award” goes to a series of university heart research projects using dogs. Animal Aid’s main criticism seems to be that these experiments were basic research.  It couldn’t find a UK cardiologist to back its claims, so it imported US “heart specialist and medical researcher” John J Pippin, who dismisses animal research thus: “This work provides an exceptional example of a common practice: the manipulation of animal models for convenience and usefulness, regardless of the effects upon the validity of results obtained.”