1 Million Dead Animals Mark the 10th Anniversary of EU Test Programme

 

For Immediate Release:

5 June 2017

Contact:

Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327, ext 222; [email protected]

1 MILLION DEAD ANIMALS MARK THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF EU TEST PROGRAMME

Animals Are Poisoned and Killed by the Thousands Despite Existence of Non-Animal Tests

London – Ten years ago, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) began administering the EU’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals regulation (REACH), which is the world’s largest chemical-testing programme of its kind. PETA has now estimated from a new report that more than 1 million animals have been killed under REACH – deaths that were likely painful and prolonged.

REACH allows experiments on animals only as a last resort, but the ECHA has revealed that scores of mice, rabbits, and guinea pigs have been subjected to painful skin and eye irritation and skin allergy tests. In these tests, massive doses of chemicals are dripped into animals’ sensitive eyes or rubbed onto their shaved skin, despite the existence of effective and reliable non-animal methods. In other tests, tens of thousands of animals have been impregnated and poisoned and their newborns dissected.

says PETA Science Policy Adviser Dr Julia Baines. “PETA is calling on the EU to regain that status by ending these cruel, archaic experiments that don’t protect humans and by instead using progressive tests that don’t harm animals.”

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – notes that more than 2,000 companies around the world refuse to allow their products or ingredients to be tested on animals. Because of the vast physiological differences between humans and the animals used in such tests, the results are often misleading.

With the European Commission’s formal evaluation of REACH due later this year, PETA has launched ademanding that Europe lead the way in progressive and innovative science by ending chemical testing on animals.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

#