Quite apart from the obvious suffering inflicted on laboratory animals, I am amazed at the experimenters’ misguided assumptions that human afflictions such as dementia and incontinence could ever be cured by creating artificial disease in mice, cats, rabbits and other animals, all of which differ so enormously from human beings.

The folly of this assumption has been shown by the frequent medical disasters caused by animal-tested drugs such as Thalidomide and Vioxx.

All of the medical specialists I have spoken with on this subject reject animal experiments as unscientific and hazardous to human health.

One of them, the German accident surgeon Dr Werner Hartinger, publicly stated that only two groups of doctors approve of animal experiments: those who have not looked into the subject and those who gain some personal advantage from them.

Dennis B Stuart, Marine Parade, Brighton