XENOTRANSPLANTATION > INFORMATION > SHEET 2

Andrew Tyler

Andrew Tyler is the Director of Animal Aid

Because, for all the scientific arguments about disease transmission, reallocation of resources and alternatives to organ transplantation, this whole question, ultimately, is an ethical one. It is about our obligation as rational and humane individuals to demand a halt to the xenotransplantation project because it is a foul, brutal, violent, insensitive and arrogant thing to be doing.

Animal Rights - an introduction
Animal rights is not about loving animals and hating people, nor about putting animals needs ahead of our own.

It is about protecting animals from cruelty and unfair treatment, just as we expect our fellow human beings to enjoy such protection.
It is about trying to live our lives without harming other animals.
It is also about treating both humans and animals with care and sympathy.

What rights for animals?
Animals obviously do not need exactly the same rights that we do. For instance, the right to vote in elections would be worthless to a parrot. On the other hand, the rights not to be tortured, or killed - except where the person who kills is acting in self-defence - are as valuable to animals as they are to humans.

How do we use animals?
Pain and misery are visited upon millions of animals for a thousand reasons. We rear and slaughter them for food. We experiment on them in laboratories. We take the skins off their backs and wear them as shoes, coats and sweaters. We hunt them for a jolly day out. We dump pets we no longer want. We pollute and destroy the natural environment we share with animals. We imprison them in zoos and circuses so that we can be 'educated' and 'amused'.

Why care about animals?
Even today, some people think of animals as inferior beings, very different from mighty humans. These people imagine animals don't have feeling or thoughts. But it is now generally accepted that animals - just like human beings - experience happiness, sadness, fear, physical pain, anger and boredom.
We know that they usually enjoy the company of their own kind. We know that there is normally a close bond between mother animals and their young. We know that young animals enjoy and learn from play. We know that animals enjoy friendships.

Are people more intelligent?
Animals cannot play the clarinet (but then neither can most people). Nor can they invent weapons of mass destruction. But they can do some amazing things that we can't. For instance, can you swing through the trees like an orang-utan? Or sniff out a bone 100 yards away in the bushes, like the average dog? Calling it 'instinct' doesn't make it less amazing. A lot of our proudest accomplishments can also be called instinct.

But in any case, to base our treatment of other creatures on the grounds of intelligence is all wrong. For it would mean the most intelligent people would get the most rights, and those born intellectually disabled, or who are damaged by illness or accident, would get the least rights. That wouldn't be fair or humane.

Animals can't communicate?
Another reason sometimes put forward to defend animal abuse is that they supposedly lack the ability to communicate. Scientific experiments have clearly demonstrated that animals have their own sophisticated language, allowing them to communicate their emotions to each other and to us. But then anybody with companion animals will already know that they can tell us when they are nervous, hungry or thirsty! They can also remember people and places that they haven't seen for months or even years.

Pain
Above all, we know that, just like us, animals feel pain. What animal have you ever heard of who can be cut by a knife or burnt by a flame and not feel it? This is the main reason why they deserve our protection. As the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, pointed out, 'The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk, but, can they suffer?'

A Lesson from history
Humans give similar excuses for the pain they inflict on animals as were once put forward to defend the exploitation of some people. Slave owners argued that their slaves were lesser beings who didn't deserve justice because they were of a different race. African families were torn apart and slaves were worked to the point of collapse on the grounds that they had 'no real human feelings'.
Is it far fetched to compare their fates with that of animals today? Alice Walker, the well-known black American writer, doesn't think so. She wrote that 'animals of the world exist for their own reason. They were not made for humans anymore than black people were made for white or women for men.' (Foreword by Alice Walker to Human and Animal Slavery, The Dreaded Comparison.' Marjorie Spiegel, Heretic Books 1988).

One great family
It was not until 1948 that the nations of the world joined together and issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which said that all people should have the freedom and respect whatever their colour, gender, religion or race.
Those of us who believe in animal rights think that animals should receive the same protection.

Xenotransplantation
Animal Aid opposes xenotransplantation not just because of the animal cruelty issue, but because we are convinced it poses serious health risks to people, and that it is also a poor use of precious resources.

Human safety
Even the experts commissioned by the government ('Animal Tissue into Humans, report by the Advisory Group on the Ethics of Transplantation) pointed to the impossibility of screening the pig organs for all the viruses and the viral particles potentially lethal to people. They made the point that you can only screen and aim to eliminate viruses whose existence you are aware of - you can't hunt down the vast number of viruses that are unknown. Some viruses - particularly the long lived retroviruses (HIV is a retrovirus) - integrate themselves into the genetic make-up of the host animal and to destroy them you have essentially to destroy the animal itself.

But despite all these unpredictable hazards, the majority of these experts thought xenotransplantation was do-able, and a good thing.

But can experts always be trusted? A number of them are receiving research grants from the businesses who will profit handsomely if xenotransplantation goes ahead.

Xenotransplantation could be a vast multi-billion dollar industry. It has a great deal to do with trying to improve profits and with certain people advancing their careers, and not very much to do with trying to improve the health of people. But, of course, that is a hard message to get over, because these important experts talk to the media about all the miracle cures that are on offer - a prospect that the public finds irresistible, particularly because of the status of those who are making the promises.

And by this time the politicians are in the frame. How can they resist such pressure, especially when you have the companies concerned threatening to take their obscene ambitions elsewhere if the government delays too long in granting the go-ahead? If we don't get going, they say the Americans and Japanese will, and see what that will mean for jobs, let alone the health of the nation.

A better use of health resources
Animal rights people have always argued that, rather than expensive, high tech medical procedures that invariably start with cruel and scientifically invalid animal experiments, our NHS should be concentrating on health promotion. It should concentrate on reducing disease by encouraging a healthy diet - one that's animal-free - plenty of exercise, stress avoidance, non-toxic alternative medicines, and so on. In other words, we need a real National Health Service instead of what we've got today - which is a National Sickness Service, that measures its success by the increasing volume of drugs people consume and by the increasing number of visits they pay to their GPs and hospitals.

If we look specifically at organ transplants, our case has been and continues to be that we can't possibly solve the immense problems of diseases of the heart, liver, kidney, lung, bowel, pancreas and so forth by replacing the damaged organs. Logistically it's impossible, even if such operations routinely produced remedies. There aren't the technicians. There isn't the cash. There isn't the cash - we're told - to do the basic primary care things that do make a difference. And yet, despite this resource crisis, the xenotransplantation scientists and businesses are building expectations, building demand to the point where people will regard it as their right to have these dubious, dicey operations. It is these sorts of forces - the demand for expensive, high tech interventions - that has brought our health service to the point of bankruptcy, even though the government's own figures show that the general population is becoming increasingly sick and feeble.

Some interesting figures
But let's consider some transplant-related factors:

Organ transplants started about 30 years ago. How many people around the world would you say have had what are described as successful operations in that time? The answer is 250,000. That's about 8,000 a year.
In the UK alone, a recent report indicated some 30,000 heart disease deaths could be averted every year if people ate more fruit and vegetables.
The commonest cause of acute liver failure is the pain tablet paracetamol. It accounts for 1 in 10 of all liver transplants. A safer version of paracetamol has been made, but it's more expensive and therefore much less often used.
The chief cause of kidney failure in UK and North American children is the E.Coli 0157 bacterium - the one that caused the recent Scottish outbreak.
Of all the child livers donated every year, some 20 percent are wasted because of lack of transplant facilities.

Nobody bothers to collect data centrally indicating the level and kinds of diseases suffered by some organ recipients after their operations. We do know, however, that there is a very high rate of cancers, infections, skin eruptions, bone and facial deformities, heart disease, diabetes and hepatitis. 1 in 10 heart recipients, for instance, suffers kidney failure as a result of the anti-rejection drugs they and other organ recipients must usually take for life. If these problems arise from matched human to human transplants, what on earth will happen when pig organs start going into people - people whose immune defences have been suppressed in order to avoid rejection? By suppressing these patients' immune defences, any pig viruses that are carried in the transplanted organ find themselves in a perfect environment in which to multiply.
At Animal Aid we're concerned about all these issues - the profit motive, misused resources etc. But as an animal campaign group, our first concern has to be animal cruelty.

More conventional organ transplantation - the transfer of an organ from one human to another; known as allotransplantation - has long been associated with animal experiments. In the early days, for instance, in California's Stanford University, some 400 heart transplants were carried out on dogs over a nine year period. And yet the first human patients both died from complications not predicted by these animal experiments.

Animal to human transplants have been attempted since 1905, with most occurring during the 1960s and involving plundering vital organs from baboons and chimpanzees. Of the roughly 40 documented operations, none succeeded in restoring meaningful quality of life to the human recipients, who all died within hours or days of surgery.

The new round of xenotransplantation experiments involve a range of gruesome procedures resulting in the switching of various organs between a variety of species. They all end in failure - the recipient animal living no more than a maximum of a few weeks - and yet they are invariably presented to the world as a triumph.

An example is the transfer of rabbit hearts onto the necks of new born piglets. The wounds are left open, covered with a plastic film, so that a good view is had of what takes place. Another called for the introduction of genetically altered pig hearts into the abdomen of monkeys.

The suffering is immense. The animals suffer all kinds of terrible complaints and must spend their lives in terror of the human monsters who masquerade as good scientists, saviours of humankind. If xenotransplantation should begin on a commercial basis, these experimental activities will still continue.
A less easily understood form of suffering is experienced by the transgenic pigs themselves - the animals with the human genes injected into them while they are still embryos, and whose fate is to be dismantled and stitched into the bodies of other animals and, one day perhaps, human beings. This process involves them being surgically removed from their mothers and the mother probably being killed. The young grow up in totally sterile conditions. They will be subjected to constant blood, faecal and nasal swabs. Some amongst them are periodically removed and killed for more complicated tests. The final stage is for their organs to be removed, either on site or at the hospital itself.
Is this really what we've come to - we human beings who regard ourselves as the crown of creation? These days we constantly hear it said that these ethical considerations matter little because pigs are already used for meat and other purposes, so what the hell's the difference?

End the secrecy
This is an utterly objectionable and ridiculous excuse. Past offences against the pig cannot justify new and novel forms of exploitation. We should be looking to make amends for what we have done to this marvellous animal, not add to the torment. Animal Aid wants a proper account of suffering that's taking place now.
How many animals are being used in these experiments and by whom? To what - in plain language - are they being subjected? What illnesses do they get during these experiments? Are they always fully anaesthetised during the painful processes, not least when organs are removed? Or are they sometimes merely immobilised with a drug such as curare? It is to these questions and others like them that we must all demand answers.