Statistics Reveal 2.76 Million Procedures on Animals Who Are Suffering in British Laboratories
Statistics Reveal 2.76 Million Procedures on Animals Who Are Suffering in British Laboratories
London – Newly released statistics reveal that in 2022, more than 2.76 million procedures were carried out on animals in British laboratories – a welcome reduction of 10% in comparison to the previous year. However, millions of other animals will have also been exploited for breeding and then discarded as “surplus” because they weren’t of the desired sex or lacked certain disease characteristics, but the government no longer considers these animals relevant enough to bother counting.
In Britain, animals can legally be abused in myriad ways, including being bled, poisoned, and deprived of food, water, or sleep. They are also subjected to psychological distress and brain damage, deliberately infected with diseases, paralysed, burned, gassed, force-fed toxic substances, electrocuted, and killed. Over the past year, the Home Office sanctioned experiments at British universities that included electric shock fear conditioning of mice, drilling implants into monkeys’ skulls, and killing and dissecting animals to study their brains.
“Not only do animal tests cause horrific suffering, even the medicines regulator recognises that they can also filter out potentially effective new drugs, delaying much-needed treatments and cures for human diseases,” says PETA Senior Science Policy Manager Dr Julia Baines. “PETA is calling on the government to align itself with public opinion by replacing animal testing with modern, humane, and human-relevant research methods.”
Just last week, the Animals in Science Committee published a letter to ministers calling for a government-led strategy on the uptake and further development of non-animal methods. The government is dragging its heels, but as political parties are currently writing their manifesto pledges, PETA is calling on the public to contact their MPs to demand commitment to a strategy to end experiments on animals.
PETA’s Research Modernisation Deal lays out a strategy for making the transition to animal-free research. The government must move with the times and end archaic experiments on animals. Arming future scientists with sophisticated, humane research tools is the best way to safeguard the lives of humans and other animals.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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