ABSTRACT
Every country’s law permits medical experimentation on animals. While some countries protect particular kinds of animals from being subject to experimentation-notably great apes and endangered species-very few place concrete limitations on what researchers may cause animals to suffer, given sufficient scientific justification. What laws do, instead, is establish standards for the humane treatment and housing of animals in labs, and they encourage researchers to limit or seek alternatives to the use of animals, when doing that is consistent with the scientific goals of their research. The result, of course, is that no existing regulatory scheme is satisfactory to opponents of animal research. The law, in their view, does nothing more than make the animal research scientist into a sort of James Bond villain: superficially polite, offering fine housing and well-prepared cuisine even to those whom he intends, eventually, to kill.
