Nilou Campbell, writing for Opinion, gives her own take on the recent news story about Cardiff University’s animal testing involving sewing the eyes of kittens shut.
Recently, Gair Rhydd reported on a story that Cardiff University has horrified the public by conducting an experiment that involved sewing shut one eye of a group of kittens. It was condemned by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) as ‘cruel’, and even Ricky Gervais took to Twitter to ask, ‘Honestly, how does this happen in so called civilised society?’ Read the comments below any of the many articles published online by national newspapers and you’ll see pages of readers who’ve been horrified by the study. It doesn’t exactly feel like the best time to be announcing, ‘I study at Cardiff University.’
Struggling to decide how I was going to begin this article, I asked my housemates what they thought about the experiment and I got exactly the response that I was expecting. I think it would be anyone’s gut reaction, and it was certainly mine – that it sounds horribly cruel. Great Britain is a nation of animal lovers, or at least we’d like to think so ÔÇô there are more animal welfare charities than you can count, a pet in every other household and TV programmes about Top Dog Models. Other countries look at the UK and are surprised by our fervent attachments to our pets. I’m certainly hugely attached to my cat, however often she vomits on my favourite clothes.
I’m certainly proud to be part of a university that conducts world-class research in so many different areas, and I’m sure that’s true of many students here. It might even be why they chose to come to Cardiff. Other universities who pride themselves on the same thing will no doubt have carried out animal research of some kind, but because they haven’t conducted this research, or because they’ve done horrible things to rats rather than kittens, they aren’t being mentioned in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph.
As a Cardiff student I feel a little scapegoated. I do wonder if a lot of the outrage has been directed towards the university simply because cats are so cute? Would the story have even be picked up by the national newspapers if something uglier or that we have less emotional attachment to had been used, like rats or pigs? In which case, what makes this more cruel?
As a student, it feels a lot of the time like our university defines at least a part of who we are. You are a Cardiff University student. You make jokes about Cardiff Metropolitan. When people ask you where you’re studying, you tell them proudly.
Whether or not you agree with the experiment carried out, it can feel shaming to have so many voices in the media and on internet forums condemning your university, and it might even feel as if they’re condemning you. You feel associated, though as a student in a different School, in a different building, on a different part of the campus, you might find it quite difficult to feel responsible for research that was conducted two years ago by a School that has nothing to do with yours.
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