Public opinion is powerful in the world of politics. Voters expect their leaders to act on issues that matter to them.
In a 2023 YouGov poll, 77 per cent of respondents said they supported a government-led strategy to phase out the use of animals in research and testing. It is clear that legislators must address these concerns if they are to meet the demands of their constituents.
In its manifesto, Keir Starmer’s Labor government pledges to “work with scientists, industry and civil society”. [they] We will work towards phasing out animal testing. ” This promise is encouraging, but the government must keep it.
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In 2023, around 2.7 million animals will be used for experiments in British laboratories, with experimenters bleeding them, poisoning them, starving them, isolating them, and subjecting them to mental and physical pain. or put them in a miserable condition.
They brain-damaged and decapitated mice, broke bones in rabbits, and starved piglets to death. And since not all of the animals met the needs of the experimenters, millions of them were bred and discarded as “surplus.”
So far, all leaders have done little to deliver on Innovate UK’s 2015 vision of using non-animal technology as standard in the UK by 2030.
Our continued reliance on animal-based methods is a major impediment to becoming a world leader in this field. We are already behind the EU, Germany, the Netherlands and the US, which have all pledged to approve plans to move away from the use of animals in various experiments.
What experimenters do to animals is abhorrent. Not only is this cruel, but it’s also bad science, with numerous studies and reviews confirming that animal testing doesn’t often lead to effective treatments or cures for humans.
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Continued use of animals diverts resources from more promising research methods and delays potentially lifesaving treatments.
Stroke, for example, affects more than 100,000 people in the UK each year and costs around £26 billion. Nevertheless, of the more than 1,000 compounds reported to have been tested in rodents in stroke research (many of which reduced brain damage in animals), only a few have been tested in clinical trials. None of the findings improved stroke outcomes in humans.
Scientific advances in recent decades have made the call to abolish animal testing more achievable than ever before.
Technologies such as organs-on-a-chip, human tissue culture, sophisticated computer models and machine learning offer methods that are not only more humane but often more accurate and cost-effective. Now you can bring your product to market faster than with tedious tasks. Old-fashioned experiments on animals.
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Numerous reports highlight the economic benefits of investing in these advanced and humane technologies.
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