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2012/22: Should animals be used in testing and research?
Introduction to the media issue
Video clip at right:In October 2012 Animal Testing Perspectives conducted a series of vox pops in European subjects, asking people in the street their views on animal testing. A range of interesting issues were raised. If you cannot see this clip, it will be because video is blocked by your network. To view the clip, access from home or from a public library, or from another network which allows viewing of video clips.
What they said...
'Some biomedical research is best undertaken on primates in order to allow the greatest relevance to understanding health and disease in humans'
The National Health and Medical Research Council
'There are already many alternatives to animals which have been developed, particularly in the areas of toxicity testing and teaching...'
Animals Australia
The issue at a glance
On December 2, 2012, it was announced that almost half a million animals were killed for research in Victoria in 2011. A total of 474,453 lab animals died last year, including 229 domestic dogs, 68 domestic cats, 113 macaques and marmoset monkeys, 421,661 lab mice, 22,325 lab rats, 36 horses and three seals and sea lions.
These numbers exclude more than a million poultry and 750,000 fish used in research.
Experiments - and the ethics committees that approve them - are audited by the state's Bureau of Animal Welfare.
Some members of ethics committees have suggested that these committees are not sufficiently rigorous and that too many experiments involving the use of animals seem to get virtually automatic approval. This claim has also been made by some animal welfare groups that have called either for far more rigorous controls or for an end to experimentation on animals. Some researchers, on the other hand, have come out in defence of current practices.