Bloodshed at Britain’s Universities

The student newspaper The Tab has just published the disturbing finding that British universities are killing more than 1.3 million animals a year in animal testing programmes.

Monkeys, badgers, dogs, cats and pigs are among the animals being abused and killed in academic institutions up and down the country. However, mice and fish are the most frequent victims of tests, with hundreds of thousands being slaughtered a year.

In laboratories, animals are kept in bleak cages and often recoil in terror from the white-coated men and women who treat them as living test tubes. Cruel experiments conducted in universities include forcing rodents to inhale toxic diesel fumes and inflicting high levels of stress on baby animals. Once a test is over, the traumatised animals are discarded and killed.

According to The Tab‘s animal testing figures, the University of Edinburgh is the worst culprit, killing a shocking 226,341 animals a year, followed by the University of Oxford, with 202,203 victims – the equivalent of five mice killed for every single student.

It’s an absolute disgrace that the UK’s supposedly world-class higher-education institutions are still conducting these archaic and inhumane tests on animals. Results obtained from horrific animal experiments in an attempt to investigate human diseases tend not even to be relevant: according to a US Food and Drug Administration report, more than 90 per cent of drugs that pass animal tests fail in human trials. Students and academics are quite simply studying the wrong species – and at the same time, inflicting unimaginable suffering on animals and going against public opinion, social progress and 21st-century scientific pursuits.

These figures were obtained through a Freedom of Information request. But we’re denied the right to know the truth about millions of other animals killed in British laboratories because of a law that keeps this information out of the public domain – despite the fact that in some cases, our taxes are paying for these appalling tests. Please write to the government minister responsible for animal testing and ask that this secrecy clause be abolished: petauk.org/secrecy