Science and animals - or, why Cyril won't win the Nobel Prize

There have always been animals in my life. I have long had a love affair with horses; dogs, too, feature strongly in my emotions and in my house. And not only companion animals, but also the wild creatures that surround us all. Even in London, in the postwar devastation I witnessed while growing up, I learned the joy of watching the birds in the trees. In what sometimes seems another life, I trained as a scientist. Ambivalent though I was about doing biology (surely I could not bear the thought of cutting up dead animals?), I ended up studying just that. For years, I agonized over the fate of animals in the laboratories, and my own role as a student of biology in that fate. Here, I want to tell something of my own story - how I survived doing science, but how my relationships with animals finally persuaded me that science was too disrespectful.