Medicines and vaccines
The discovery and development of new medicines, vaccines and medical devices for people and animals is a long and complex process with a number of stages, many of which involve animal experiments. National and international regulations currently require that new medicines are tested on animals before being licensed for use. Around 5 million animals including mice, rats, fish, chickens, rabbits, dogs and primates are used across the EU for this purpose each year.
What animals experience
The degree of suffering, which may include both physical pain and psychological distress, depends on the nature of the experiment. Generally, animals are 'given' a disease or condition then experiments are done to investigate:
- how the illness develops
- what effects it has
- how it could be prevented or its progress halted
- whether proposed treatments actually work
As well as pain and distress from the scientific procedures used, animals will suffer from the symptoms of the disease or condition that is being studied. Healthy animals are also then used to assess the safety of any treatments developed before trials are done on humans or on farm or pet animals. Animals are usually killed at the end of the tests.
What we believe
We believe that the need to experiment on animals, and the justification for the suffering caused, should be more critically questioned. Questions must be asked regarding:
- how important is the problem being studied? - animals should not suffer so that society can have a 'pill for every ill', when the condition is trivial, self-inflicted, or avoidable with a little effort
- how likely is it that the research will succeed? - there is significant debate about the usefulness of information obtained from animal experiments, particularly for studying human diseases
What we are doing
We work with government officials, scientists in universities and the pharmaceutical industry, and other animal welfare organisations, to promote thorough ethical review of research projects, along with the maximum possible implementation of the 3Rs to reduce animal use and suffering in medical and veterinary research.