Colin Blakemore - Animal Testing and Animal Rights

Animal Testing and Animal Rights

Blakemore is outspoken in his support of the use of animal testing in medical research, though he has publicly denounced fox hunting and animal testing for cosmetics.

He came to the attention of the animal rights movement while at Oxford University in the 1980s, when he carried out research into amblyopia and strabismus, conducting experiments that involved sewing kittens' eyelids shut from birth in order to study the development of their visual cortex. Blakemore has said of the research that it was directly applicable to humans, and that "hanks to it, and similar research, we now know why conditions like amblyopia — the most common form of child blindness — occur and are now able to tackle it and think of ways of preventing it."

Subsequently, according to The Observer, he and his family "endured assaults by masked terrorists, bombs sent to his children, letters laced with razor blades, a suicide bid by his wife, and more than a decade of attacks and abuse."

In 1992, together with Les Ward of the anti-vivisection group Advocates for Animals, he co-founded a bipartisan think tank called the Boyd Group, to consider issues relating to animal experimentation.

In 1998, during the 68-day hunger strike of British animal-rights activist Barry Horne, Blakemore's life was threatened in a statement released by Robin Webb of the Animal Liberation Press Office on behalf of the Animal Rights Militia. Direct action against him has abated since the prosecution of Cynthia O'Neill for harassing him in 2000.

Blakemore has advocated frank and full public debate about animal research and has worked to persuade other researchers to be more open. He has been chair of the Coalition for Medical Progress, the Research Defence Society and Understanding Animal Research, an organisation devoted to making the case for responsible use of animals in research, which was launched in 2008.