A few words about animal testing - not about political opportunism.

When you try out a new recipe you probably have a hierarchy of test subjects. If you aren't too sure or you know it's gone wrong - much though you love them - you'll try the first result out on the family pets. Then your partner then the kids.

That's the acceptable face of animal testing.

Then there's we've designed this drug or other chemical product and we haven't designed it to fail, we've designed it to succeed.

Then there's the infamous LD 50 test.

You may not know this but most drugs have a safe dose for adults and no safe dose recommendation for children.

LD 50 is Lethal Dose 50. It means you take a bunch of animals and you divide them into batches or groups and you administer the drug or product - I mean floor polish or bleach or scent or hair spray or anti aging cream - in different strengths and you find out which strength kills half of the group that was given that dose.

They do that on animals. They don't do it on people - except at Porton Down in the 1950s.

In fact, there are now more animal friendly testing methods available. Now that we know more about how drugs act we can devise estimates of what the strongest dose anybody could benefit from would be and administer say ten or a hundred times that dose to lab animals to check for side effects and stop the trial long before LD 50 doses are reached.

On the other hand, when the purpose is to kill - insecticides for example - other methods have taken off in a big way. The statistics of the situation have changed attitudes and now we often use animals to control animals - like ladybirds bred and encouraged to keep green fly numbers down.

It's a recognition that a 90 per cent yield with no pesticide reidues is a better result than a 100 per cent yield of toxic potatoes...

Then there's little boys with big boys' toys. Hey Wayne I wonder what'll 'appen if we cut this worm in 'alves.

Then there's I know what'll happen if I kick this badger in the head and I love it.

I gonna tell you a story. Way back when Eston had a grammar school. In around 1973 it stopped selecting its intake and became Gillbrook School.

A sixth form college was set up up the road and took a lot of equipment and left a fair bit.

Amongst what was left were some frozen lab rats.

A very enthusiastic but unqualified - apart from his Oxford degree in something that wasn't teaching in a deprived area of Teesside - decided to improve on the local children's learning experience. He had the lab technicians thaw out one of the rats and dissected it for his one lower school biology class.

The next thing the technician know he's being asked to confirm for the head teacher that the school is not breeding rats. Why? Because little Johnny went home all excited and told mummy In biology today teacher cut up a real live rat.

Little Johnny meant a real rat not a plastic model from Mattel but the school was all set for a vivisection scandal....

Somewhere in around that lot is the 'old chestnut' about natural remedies being safe.

There's a confusion of motives here. Many regulations about such things as drug and product testing only apply to new products. This is the same argument which stops governments from banning tobacco, too much of the world's economy revolves around traditional products such as tobacco for governments to ban them overnight and so they are 'excused testing'. That don't sop their proponents going ahead and testing anyway hence the 70s term Smokes like a beagle which comes from tobacco companies making beagle dogs smoke in an effort to proved it didn't harm them and animal activists liberating them from the labs...

The confusion is in thinking that if something isn't tested it must be so safe it isn't worthwhile. WRONG.

Hence people who want to sell dangerous products will support animal rights activists so as to avoid having their product tested....