‘I Can’t Watch Anymore’: Kate Lawler, Amanda Abbington, Kirsty Gallacher, and More React in Horror to Animal Experiments in New PETA Video

London – A new PETA video sees six celebrities break down in tears, recoil, and turn away from the screen as they watch footage of monkeys being restrained, rats having tubes shoved down their throats, and other animals crying out and suffering during cruel laboratory experiments. Presenters Kate Lawler, Kirsty Gallacher, and Gail Porter alongside actors Amanda Abbington, Roxy Shahidi, and Jamie Bamber, are visibly shaken by the suffering they witness and call on the government to accelerate the transition to cutting-edge, non-animal methods.

With tears in her eyes, Gallacher looks away from the video and says, “I can’t watch anymore,” before Porter declares, “It’s disgusting, it’s barbaric, it’s inhumane, it’s vulgar.” The footage offers just a glimpse of the pain and terror that millions of monkeys, dogs, rats, mice, birds, horses, and other animals experience as they may be poisoned, cut open, blinded, electrocuted, or infected with deadly diseases in UK laboratories every year.

Credit: PETA

The video comes days after PETA delivered an open letter to Downing Street, signed by over 30,00 people, urging the Prime Minister to end experiments on animals. The government has announced plans to phase out experiments on animals and invest in human-relevant research methods, yet millions of animals are still used in painful and frightening procedures in laboratories. “Why do this when we know it doesn’t work?” Gallacher asks, before Shahidi adds, “We should be moving away from it immediately.” Referring to humane, non-animal methods—which include human organoids, lab-grown human tissue, and artificial intelligence—Lawler calls for a faster transition. “The process needs to be sped up. We’re dragging our heels.”

“Animals in laboratories feel pain, fear, and distress, yet they continue to be poisoned, restrained, and subjected to invasive procedures while state-of-the-art, human-relevant methods already exist,” says PETA Head of Science Policy Dr Julia Baines. “PETA is calling on the government to turn its strategy into swift action and replace experiments on animals with superior non-animal science.”

PETA’s Research Modernisation Deal lays out a roadmap for replacing experiments on animals with human-relevant methods, including redirecting funding from experiments on animals to non-animal research, reviewing areas in which animal studies have failed to advance human health, and training scientists and regulators in non-animal methods.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – points out that when it comes to the ability to feel pain, hunger, and fear, a mouse is a dog is a boy. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow PETA on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.  

Contact:

Lucy Watson +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]

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