Testing times for Starmer

Public opinion is powerful in the world of politics: voters expect leaders to act on the issues important to the electorate. 

A massive 77 per cent of respondents told a 2023 YouGov poll that they supported a government-led strategy for phasing out the use of animals in research and testing. It’s clear that parliamentary representatives must address these concerns if they’re to meet voter demands. 

In its manifesto, Keir Starmer’s Labour government commits to “partner with scientists, industry, and civil society as [they] work towards the phasing out of animal testing”. This promise is encouraging, but the government must be held to it.

Treatments

In 2023, almost 2.7 million animals were used in experiments in British laboratories, where experimenters bled, poisoned, starved, or isolated them, subjected them to psychological suffering and physical pain, and kept them in miserable conditions. 

They inflicted brain injuries on mice and decapitated them, broke rabbits’ bones, and left piglets to starve. And because not all animals met the experimenters’ needs, millions of them were bred and discarded as “surplus”.

So far, leader after leader has done little to implement Innovate UK’s 2015 vision for non-animal technologies to be used as standard in the UK by 2030.

Our continued reliance on animal-based methods is a significant obstacle to our becoming a world leader in this sector. Already, we lag behind the EU, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US, which have committed to approve plans to transition away from using animals in various experiments.

What experimenters do to animals is abhorrent. Not only is it cruel, it’s also bad science, with numerous studies and reviews confirming that experiments on animals translate poorly into effective treatments and cures for humans. 

Archaic

Continuing to use animals diverts resources away from more promising research methods, delaying potentially life-saving treatments. 

Strokes, for example, affect more than 100,000 people in the UK every year, costing around £26 billion. Despite this, out of over 1,000 compounds reported to have been tested on rodents in stroke studies – many of which reduced brain damage in the animals – none that reached clinical trials improved stroke outcomes in humans.

Scientific advancements in recent decades have made the call to end experiments on animals more viable than ever. 

Technologies like organ-on-a-chip, human tissue cultures, and sophisticated computer models and machine learning now offer methods that are not only more humane but also often more accurate and cost-effective, allowing products to reach the market faster than cumbersome, archaic tests on animals. 

Safety

Numerous reports have highlighted the economic benefits of investing in these advanced, humane technologies.