Animal testing is unavoidable for scientific progress, but mainland Europe has no equivalent to the UK group Pro-Test to speak out for it. Our negative experience demands that scientists and politicians rectify this deficit in public information.

We set out to study the factors that determine survival after avalanche burial, with a view to improving rescue and reducing mortality. The interactions, after snow burial, of hypoxia (oxygen deficiency), hypercapnia (an excess of carbon dioxide in the blood) and hypothermia are poorly understood. But, under the Helsinki Declaration, such investigations are permissible only in animals.

Our study, which involved monitoring 29 anaesthetized pigs buried in snow at altitudes of 1,900 metres, was formally approved by the Austrian federal ministry of science and research and supervised on site by a representative. It was undertaken with scrupulous attention to Directive 86/609/EEC of the European Council.

However, we were forced to abandon the experiments because of a concerted outburst by animal-rights organizations and the sensationalist press, aggravated by television, radio and a few politicians (see http://go.nature.com/lbYzuO). There followed an 'avalanche' of misrepresentations, false accusations, even bomb and death threats.

How could flawed reporting of our experiments make front-page headlines for four days during the Haiti catastrophe? Is the loss of some 200,000 human lives in Haiti less important than the alleged suffering of anaesthetized pigs on people's doorstep?

Most fellow scientists and the relevant government ministries remained silent during this totally unexpected, hostile campaign, failing to support our attempts to correct misinformation and justify our investigation.

The enormous gap in public awareness of the scientific benefits of strictly regulated animal research fosters such misconceptions and encourages manipulation. Schools and universities can help to correct this by conveying the value of well presented, unbiased, evidence-based information from ethically evaluated animal experimentation to the widest audience.