Animal Aid: Animal Experiments

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS

Animal Experiments

Each year inside British laboratories, approximately 3 million animals are experimented on. Every 10.5 seconds, one animal dies. Cats, dogs, rats, mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, primates and other animals are used to test new products, to study human disease and in the development of new drugs. They are even used in warfare experiments. Animal Aid opposes animal experiments on both moral and scientific grounds. Animals are not laboratory tools. They are sentient creatures capable of experiencing pain, fear, loneliness, frustration and sadness.

To imprison animals and deny them their freedom to express natural instincts and to deliberately inflict physical pain in the name of science is unacceptable. All the more so because the experiments are bad science in the first place: they do not produce information that can be reliably applied to people. Ending vivisection will benefit people as well as animals.

End Primate Experiments in Europe

Approximately 10,000 primates are used in research laboratories across the EU annually, with more than a third of them undergoing experiments in the UK. A new EU Directive allows the possibility of a ban on the use of primates.

Oxford University

Oxford University is building a new animal research centre despite a wealth of evidence that animal experiments are not only morally unjustifiable but that they are also scientifically irrelevant. We are calling on Oxford University to build instead a state-of-the-art facility for human-based studies.

Humane Research

Hundreds of thousands of animals are bred and killed every year so that their body parts can be used in test tube studies. At the same time, huge amounts of a genuinely useful research material - human tissue - is being incinerated. Since 1991, Animal Aid has fought this insanity.

Mad Science

Animal Aid's Mad Science Awards (AAMSAs) are handed out each year for pointless and grotesque scientific research. Award winners receive a diploma featuring the special AAMSA motif of a laboratory beagle stabbed with a scalpel.

REACH

The new, Europe-wide chemical testing legislation known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) has now been passed and will come into effect in June 2007. Chemicals that were marketed prior to 1981 (when testing requirements were less stringent) will now have to undergo extensive safety testing. While Animal Aid and many other organisations campaigned for only non-animal methods to be employed, sadly millions of animals will still be poisoned to death in these cruel and unnecessary tests. The best estimate we have is that somewhere between 8 and 13 million animals will die over an 11-year period.