What can be said of men and women who spend their working days squirting disinfectants down the throats of animals or rubbing equally caustic substances into their quivering shaved pelts? I think most people would denounce them as sadistic perverts  and call for them to be clapped in jail.

Yet last year alone, over three million such horrible experiments were carried out in British laboratories under government licence. The teams doing them, in protective gloves and masks, so as not inadvertently to imbibe the poisons they were inflicting on helpless creatures, were not regarded, and did not regard themselves,  as torturers.

They considered themselves as diligent, scientific protectors of mankind. And still do. Better to watch a rabbit writhe in gasping torment than sell a housewife a scalp-scalding shampoo. That, for years, in modern times, has been the standard line taken by the practitioners of vivisection and the elected administrators who licence them.

Every now and then, though, the world moves upwards rather than downwards. This week the present home secretary, Theresa May, announced a decision that puts this country on a higher plane. She said that it would in future be illegal to test household caustic goods on live animals. The goods, to be found in safe and often locked cupboards, well away from children, under kitchen and bathroom hatches, could never, under ancient and pitiless rules, have reached the shelves of shops, had their toxity not been tried out on animals.

They include wasp and fly killers,  the bleaches one pours down lavatory pans, the disinfectants one mops dirty floors with, washing up liquids of the type which this week caused a minor blood-poisoning outbreak at the Royal Northern College of Music, various kinds of glue, gallon pots of eye-smarting paint.    

Such is the stuff, and worse, which laboratory boffins still feed or rub into animals to find out what it does to them. It has been known for years what it does to them. (Exactly the same that, if  taken accidentally, it does to us). They vomit, they bleed, they burn, they gasp and writhe, they paw helplessly at melting eyeballs, they squeal or scream.

I gather that rodents and rabbits are the favourite candidates for this treatment on behalf of the human race; but dogs and cats, and occasionally a sheep or pig not needed for the table, are selected for the more complicated organic experiments. Extraordinarily, many of these animals survive their short careers in antiseptic torture chambers. Not that it does them any good. They are routinely killed, to be replaced by animals which do not know what is coming to them. Behavioural analysis requires a non-apprehensive subject.

The important thing is that the splendid Theresa May will now put a stop to it---or will if Parliament lets her. Cynics will say she has been prodded into it by a swelling campaign of humanitarians and anti-vivisectionists. I have met the lady: and I believe she needed no prodding; her compassionate heart is in it. 

But she will have been much encouraged, in her resolve, by quite a few retail companies in this country who ages ago refused to stock household goods that had involved the tormenting of animals. Among them are Marks and Spencer, Astonish and the Co-operative Society.

She will also be aware that trying cosmetics out on animals has been banned since 2002. That ban was brought in by the Blair administration, as a timorous attempt to fall in with the EU’s declaration of hostility towards all inessential vivisections. However, spraying or painting new brands of lipstick, mascara and perfumes on rabbits and dogs still defiantly continues in many of the EU’s member countries, to the rage of, among other notable humanitarians, Sir Paul McCartney, who has bought up much of our countryside to stop sadists chasing foxes on it. 

Most of the time, governments get things bumbling wrong; but now and then they advance civilisation. The credit for the repeal of letting boffins drench small animals in toxic detergents belongs to Theresa May, and, of course, to her front bench backers in the Cameron administration. What else of importance could have been going on to prevent such an historic breakthrough getting reported in the daily newspapers? Not even the two main Tory broadsheets  found space for it. Nor, unless I missed a  bulletin, could the BBC.

Hotel noise is a snore point

NOISY sleepers who fancy a weekend break in Leeds would be wise to avoid booking in at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. It’s not a bad hotel, but it has imposed a strict snoring ban. Anti-snore cops patrol the corridors at nights to make sure the guests are behaving themselves in bed.

The functionaries are authorised to tap politely on any door behind which too much noise is being made. If it is, they will urge the culprit to get up at once and move to a room in what they call the quiet sleeping zone.

Laura Simpson, 28, one of the monitors says: “We have these quiet zones on two floors. People can specifically ask for them if they are light sleepers. My role on patrol is to make sure there are no offensive noises.”

The hotel’s policy is inspired by the keyhole testimony of bedroom-noise measurers in Europe and the United States. They have discovered that some snores are almost as loud as the noise made by a powerful chain saw. But what about the decibel ratings of dins made by restless double horizontals ? The experts don’t say, but point out that a chain saw’s is 100.

Putting me right

I DON’T usually reply to my critics in Postbag, but I’m making an exception for the learned and  perceptive Gavin Lewis who, in reply to my piece about the King James Bible,  regretted that I had neglected to mention the book’s influence on great English writers.

He’s right, of course. All I can plead is that I ran out of space—especially for Ecclesiastes which is in itself a masterpiece of wiry and sardonic prose. 

As Mr Lewis notes, without the cadences of the Bible, Hemingway could not have written a line. Shakespeare too, though a bit too young to have savoured the KJ translation, borrows from the Bible several times, though from the much earlier Tyndale version.

For producing the first good Bible for ordinary Englishmen, poor Tyndale was strangled by priests. Religious people have never approved of the Gospels.

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