Cruelty Free International is pressing for release of a mysterious project licence issued by the Home Office to St Andrews University which permits experiments on wild seals.

Part of the permitted work includes catching and tracking seals for conservation studies; other experiments may involve housing the seals in laboratory pools and blasting them with painfully loud noises. A public summary of the permitted project admits “some animals will be exposed to noise or other stimuli to assess their effect on seals.”

Cruelty Free International has pressed St Andrews to release the full project licence which authorises these experiments on seals, so that there can be a sensible public discussion about why this research is taking place and how much suffering is involved.

Cruelty Free International raised concerns in 2013 about earlier experiments at St Andrews that involved trapping wild seals and blasting them underwater with loud noises of up to 170 decibels which caused them to leap out of their pools in fear. 170 decibels is staggeringly loud – to put it in content, standing near to a jet engine is approximately 140 decibels.

The purpose of these experiments was to investigate new ways to keep seals away from fish farms and had been funded by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Salmon Producers Organisation. A more recently reported experiment involved blasting the seals with sonar, in an attempt to investigate the effects of sea turbines and was funded by Npower.

The public summary for the current research does not say what level of noise the seals will be exposed to, how many seals will be involved in this part of the project (the university vaguely says “a few hundred” in total), or what the exact purpose is.

We strongly believe that it is in the public interest for further details of these distressing experiments to be released. Even those who might want to defend such research are hampered by the secrecy. The case is now with the Scottish Information Commissioner following the university’s repeated refusal to release the licence.

Why is the university keeping the public in the dark?

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2011. Repeated elicitation of the acoustic startle reflex leads to sensitisation in subsequent avoidance behaviour and induces fear conditioning. BMC Neuroscience; 12:30.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/309585/Volume_17.pdf

2014. Behavioral responses by grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) to high frequency sonar. Mar Pollut Bull. 2014 Feb 15;79(1-2):205-10.

The Npower Juice fund supports renewable generation projects – since its launch in 2001, the fund has provided nearly £1.8 million to support renewable energy projects across the country, including wave and tidal stream technologies.