Animals Left to Starve in Northern Irish Laboratories
In Northern Ireland, breaches of the law supposedly protecting animals used in experiments have risen for the third time in four years. Among the incidents, experimenters failed to provide mice and birds with food and water and confined them to tiny cages – smaller than required by law. These mice and birds, who are capable of feeling pain and fear just as humans are, suffer enough when used as laboratory equipment. Failing to grant them even their basic rights, such as food and water, and to meet minimum standards of accommodation is unacceptable and cruel.
Since advanced modern research methods are available, there is also no excuse to torment animals in laboratories.
22,707 Procedures in One Year
Legislation regulating experiments on animals doesn’t protect sensitive cats, dogs, and other individuals from being tormented.
During 2020 in Northern Ireland, 22,707 procedures were performed on animals. In these tests, animals could be starved, deprived of water or sleep, force-fed chemicals, blinded, terrorised, gassed, irradiated, infected with diseases, brain-damaged, surgically mutilated, paralysed, poisoned … The list goes on. All these terrifying and painful procedures are legal. Why are we still subjecting thousands of sensitive individuals to these horrors when better research methods are available?
Reliance on Testing on Animals Costs Human Lives
Did you know that ibuprofen causes kidney failure and stomach ulcers in cats and dogs? Or that morphine, a depressant for humans, has the opposite effect on goats and horses? Many useful drugs that have been used safely by humans for decades, such as penicillin or tamoxifen (used for treating breast cancer), may have never made it to market if they were subject to today’s animal testing regulatory requirements.
PETA US
Our bodies are not the same as those of other species, and we often process or react to drugs very differently to one another.
Taking healthy beings of a completely different species, artificially inducing a condition that they would never normally develop, keeping them in an unnatural and stressful environment, and trying to apply the results to naturally occurring diseases in human beings is, at best, a dubious methodology.
Animal-Free Science Is the Way Forward
Instead of wasting millions of pounds on tests that produce dubious results, we must shift to advanced animal-free research that is actually relevant to humans.
PETA’s Research Modernisation Deal provides a detailed strategy for ending experiments on animals and replacing them with humane and human-relevant alternatives, including treatments that use patient-derived and donated stem cells, human genome information, advanced computer modelling, and human organs-on-a-chip.
Take a Stand Against All Experiments on Animals
Urge the government to move away from archaic tests and embrace science relevant to the 21st century. Sign our petition to support PETA’s Research Modernisation Deal:
