WITH a mixture of persuasion and manipulation of its licensing system for animal experiments, the government is today able to hail a voluntary ban by firms on animals being used to test cosmetics.

It is a long overdue victory for both animals rights and compassion.

For if the use of animals for mankind's benefit is a necessity -- though many campaigners would challenge that premiss -- the exploitation of them, often painfully and lethally, simply for the sake of the vanity of individuals was always an abuse by and of humanity.

The government is right to have worked to end an oppression and cruelty that was made all the worse by its frivolous purpose.

One caveat, however, needs to be observed. That is that the more strident animals rights activists, buoyed by this move, may now be encouraged to demand bans on the use of animals for medical and veterinary research.

But it would be wrong for emotion to stifle such progress -- especially when the use of animals in medical experiments has, time and again in the development of drugs and treatments, proved of immense value to sufferers, both human and animal.

That is not to say that medical science should be given the scope or consent to experiment as it pleases.

For the concerns of the animal rights campaigners are not based solely on mawkish sentiment, but often on serious doubts about the merit and frequency of much research involving animals.

And official consent for this kind of experimentation must always be qualified -- and backed up by strict monitoring -- by a licensing system that clearly ties researchers to goals that are achievable and that they are ones that can only be sought by the use of animals and not other methods such as computer modelling.

The controls must also ensure that research using animals only employs methods that are as free from pain and distress as possible.

It is practical compassion and neither blinkering passion nor benevolent ruthlessness that must be the guide in this fraught field of progress.

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