Pycroft was summarily ejected from the march, but he decided to set up a website drawing attention to the lies and how they should be rebutted. Within a week, the site had received several thousand hits, and ­Pycroft realised there was a hidden majority that objected to the dishonesty, ignorance and irrationality of the antivivisection movement. A new movement, Pro-Test, was born. It attracted nearly 1,000 people to its first march, held in Oxford in February 2006, with high-profile media coverage and support from Tony Blair. Since then, Pro-Test has become highly organised, carrying out two more successful marches, and handing out free doughnuts to the building’s construction workers.

Pro-Test has caught the imagination of the 90 per cent share of the public that supports animal research for advancing medicine. It is rational and well informed, started not by animal experimentalists with a vested interest, but by university students who want to defend truth and reason against violence and unreason. They explain how animal experiments are not cruel and painful, but carefully monitored and controlled by the Home Office. They make clear how important these experiments have been to the advance of scientific medicine. In Oxford, animal experiments have often proved crucial — from the development of penicillin through to techniques for deep brain stimulation for the alleviation of movement disorders such as Parkinson’s ­disease. Almost all modern drugs and procedures derive from animal experiments ­because only these allow scientists to work out the mechanisms involved.

During our lifetimes, two mice and half a rat will be used on behalf of each of us for medical research. Your cat will kill more than that in a single night, and we eat an average of 1,000 chickens, 25 pigs and 15 cows per person throughout our lives. Would an ALF member forgo antibiotics for her child, whimpering in pain from meningitis, because the isolation of penicillin involved the death of eight rats?

But the arguments fall on deaf ears. ­Although the public support for Pro-Test has meant that more scientists are prepared to explain why they do animal experiments, they do not expect the ALF to listen. The antivivisectionists are immune to rational debate.