Lei Xiangping

    lagon235@163.com

    ON Dec. 5, several photos posted online showing dozens of laboratory dogs that were found discarded on the rooftop of a building at a medical school in Shaanxi Province went viral. From the photos, it seems they were left to freeze in the cold weather without any food. Some of the dogs were bleeding and some with bandaged mouths were too feeble to move around.

    Next to them, several discarded packing cases of injectable medicines and used bandages could be seen, indicating that these dogs, some of them still alive, had been thrown away as medical trash after experiments. The sorrowful photos angered many people — some even criticized the use of animals as experimental tools for human purposes.

    To denounce the inhumanity of the Shaanxi medical school, one furious netizen posted a photo from a Sichuan medical school that organized a funeral for 200 laboratory animals to honor their contributions to medical research.

    After comparing the different ways two medical schools handled their laboratory animals, people can easily conclude that the laboratory staff members at the Shaanxi school must be condemned for their cruelty.

    Unsurprisingly, the punishment for them was severe: bowing to public pressure, the laboratory was closed temporarily and the staff member in charge of processing laboratory dogs was suspended from his job. The punishments brought some relief to the people who were angered by the inhuman treatment of the laboratory animals.

    Nevertheless, the issue of how laboratory animals should be treated remains unsolved because only attributing the absence of individual sympathy and consciousness to the mistreatment of laboratory animals is not enough. The case of mistreating dogs in Shaanxi only reveals the individual immorality of the staff of one single laboratory.

    However, the deep-rooted reason behind the mistreatment of dogs in Shaanxi is that China has almost no laws for animal welfare protection.

    Various fields, such as pharmacology, chemistry, agriculture, environment protection and aerospace development, require animal testing to achieve the best results. So when people criticize the Shaanxi school for mistreating laboratory dogs, their criticism should not focus on whether using laboratory animals for experimental purposes is humane, but on how to use them humanely and properly.

    According to an international standard, when using laboratory animals for scientific research, researchers should try their best to minimize laboratory animals’ pain during the experiments and offer them soothing treatments like applying tranquilizer medicines or euthanasia after the experiments. This standard has been translated into animal welfare protection laws in more than 100 countries globally, but not in China.

    Until now, the Chinese Government has only introduced an administrative rule for managing laboratory animals, which stipulates ambiguously that no joke playing or mistreatment can be applied to laboratory animals. In Shaanxi Province, a similar rule was introduced suggesting that pain and anxiety in the animals should be avoided during and after experiments. However, neither rule specifies what concrete measures should be taken to protect laboratory animals during and after the experiments, so they almost have no legal binding for the behaviors of staff members dealing with laboratory animals.

    The absence of animal welfare protection laws in China has caused problems beyond laboratories. For example, last year, animal conservationists and dog sellers in Yulin City, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, had a series of confrontations over whether dogs should be killed and eaten during a local dog meat festival. Dog sellers tried to irritate conservationists and stir up their sympathy by mistreating the dogs so that their dogs could be sold at higher prices to the conservationists who were trying to stop people from killing the dogs.

    Because of a lack of concrete animal welfare protection laws, people and companies will continue to mistreat dogs and other animals. Last year, China’s top legislature recognized “animal welfare” for the first time in the Wild Animal Protection Law.

    However, the welfare of non-wild animals was not mentioned. Relying on individual sympathy and virtues is not effective in protecting laboratory animals, and it is time for the country’s lawmakers to do something.

    (The author is a News Desk editor with China Radio International.)