Reacción a "Spanish centres make progress in transparency in animal experimentation, according to COSCE report"

The seventh monitoring report on the COSCE Agreement on Transparency in the Use of Animals for Scientific Experimentation in Spain is, in summary, a summary of the transparency activities carried out by the 168 institutions adhering to this commitment. It is therefore an instrument that enables COSCE to monitor the state of play on this issue.

However, the following limitations of the document should be noted:

1. It is not useful for citizens or institutions. The document allows COSCE to determine the degree of transparency of each of the adherents according to the criteria of the agreement. However, from its reading the general public cannot directly obtain information on the type of animals used for experimentation, the type of harm they are subjected to, the percentage of failed versus successful experiments, the expected benefit for the successful ones, the living conditions of the animals used or the ethical assumptions guiding the research. To get an overview of all this would require reviewing the websites of each of the 168 member organisations, which is impossible in practical terms. Real transparency requires providing all relevant data in a way that is understandable, accessible and public for the average citizen. Under the circumstances, the Agreement and its monitoring report are a necessary but insufficient step towards this goal.
2. Incorrect transparency in figures. In the previous paragraph I pointed out how from reading the report it is not even possible to know the type of animals used in experimentation. This is because the figures in it are incorrect. The authors rightly state that ‘what is fundamental [...] is not so much legal requirements, but voluntary actions and the desire to share information’ (p.13). They act in the opposite way, however, by reporting the number and type of animals used, limiting themselves to mentioning vertebrate animals and cephalopods used in experimentation, which are those that fall under the scope of the European Directive and the Royal Decree on animal experimentation. A real exercise in transparency would give figures for absolutely all invertebrate animals actually used.