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By Alex Lennane
Live animal transport has been in the spotlight recently: the death of several pets in the care of airlines has been much reported.
And the airlines have responded with new products.
This week, Flydubai launched a live animal transport service and Delta Airlines announced it had teamed up with CarePod, a pet technology start-up that has developed “new standards of safety and care for pet air travel”.
However, far less frequently reported is the battle between airlines and the US National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR).
Over the past five ...
Comment on this article
Lucy Post
October 05, 2018 at 7:16 pmI applaud airlines that refuse to have any part in the cruel business of transporting animals to laboratories to be caged, subjected to painful procedures, and killed. Not only is experimenting on animals extremely cruel, it’s derailing cures for human diseases, because reactions to various drugs and diseases vary greatly between species. Advanced, non-animal, human-relevant methods are where the real hope lies.
jim
October 07, 2018 at 7:15 pmThis comment in uninformed. Animals are used in a variety of ways, such as using mouse antibodies to make cancer drugs so in such cases animals literally are the cure, they’re not delaying anything. Non-animal alternatives can be used for simple tests and they are 4x cheaper than animal models, which is why they are used if they exist. You don’t see researchers burning through their grant money unnecessarily, any more than someone would pay 4x the going rate for a new TV.
Interestingly in Europe it is illegal to use an animal if there is an alternative and there are still c10million experiments each year, so that’s clearly 10 million examples of where your ‘human relevant’ meme falls over.
Kim Marie
October 05, 2018 at 7:22 pmAirlines should want nothing to do with the sordid business of shipping animals to their deaths in laboratories for useless experiments.
Jim Matthews
October 07, 2018 at 6:45 pmWhilst agreeing with everything this article says, i am a bit mystified as to how biomedical researchers could stop a third party bullying transporters.
Alex Lennane
October 11, 2018 at 4:21 pmJim, agreed! I really meant to say that I suspect their focus is in the wrong place.