Reacción a "Spanish centres make progress in transparency in animal experimentation, according to COSCE report"

The report is correct and says a lot about research activity in Spain. Spanish institutions are undoubtedly at the forefront of commitments to transparency regarding the use of nonhuman animals in research, communicating data, numbers, species, project details, information on animal welfare, ‘three Rs’, etc., and carrying out various actions to raise public awareness of the importance of their activity. However, it is curious to note how, in this rhetoric of transparency and animal welfare, ‘animals’ are both present and absent from it: present in numbers, statistics, eventually shown to us through a photograph or a video. Animals are instruments or inputs to scientific procedures, and also ‘economic assets’ that value research work, which results in profits in a society based on the knowledge economy.

The limitation would be that such rhetoric empties animals of a more transcendental meaning, of a meaning that gives them moral relevance. I explain: the activities and statistics highlighted and ‘made transparent’ in the report empty animals of further moral consideration and uncritically accept that research is a necessary activity because it brings great benefits to humanity. Here there is a failure to consider the risks and benefits that research entails, at the same time, for the animal in which such procedures are applied. Animals used in research, like most other animals, are complex, sentient beings, endowed with the neurological basis for consciousness (see Cambridge Declaration, 2012). Many animals, including vertebrates and many invertebrates, are conscious and capable of subjectively experiencing the world (see New York Declaration, 2024). But we continue to treat them as tools in a society and economy based on species prejudice (speciesism). All this is a huge challenge, because it is not enough to treat animals well in order to have good research results. It would be, among other things, a matter of achieving a more equitable balance of risks and benefits when we consider the animal as a sentient and conscious being, rather than a tool. This is a challenge for animal research ethics committees, for researchers' training in ethics, bioethics and research integrity, among others.