Animal experiments in the UK

Animal experiments are a subject that will get a lot of people's blood boiling. I won't buy a product if it's been tested on animals, and I know a lot of people feel the same way. This is why it's surprising to hear that in some cases, animal experiments have gone up.

Home Office figures have revealed that in 2008, Scotland carried out 555,567 experiments on 544,949 individual animals, which is an increase of 42 percent since 2007. It also makes up 15 percent of Britain's total animal experiments.

The UK's leading non-animal medical research charity, the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, say urgent action on alternatives is needed to reverse the trend and calls for political commitment to a "roadmap" to replace animal experiments.

In Scotland, the majority of increased occurred in experiments on fish (258 percent rise to 184,335), birds (38 percent rise to 6193), amphibians (345 percent rise to 383), mice (12 percent rise to 290,081), hamsters (56 percent rise to 688) and pigs (16 percent rise to 883).

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The Dr Hadwen Trust

The Dr Hadwen Trust believes that Scotland could have a crucial role to play in replacing animal experiments.

"Because the government doesn't implement a targeted approach to replacing animals, we have no overall trend of decline; one year the figures increase, the next they decrease without any real progress being made." says Dr Farnaud "It's time for that to change and Scotland could play a significant role despite animal experiments not being a devolved issue. Currently Scotland conducts a massive 15 percent of Britain's total animal experiments. If Scottish politicians took decisive action to encourage universities and research establishments to energetically pursue a drive to develop more non-animal replacements techniques, that could have a dramatic and positive impact."

According to their site, globally, scientific research uses millions of animals in experiments every year. These experiments can cause pain, suffering and inevitably death for the animals used in them, for results that are of dubious relevance to human health.

The Dr Hadwen Trust develops non-animal research methods to replace animal experiments. "We enable scientific research and make medical progress without causing suffering to animals. We have successfully developed new non-animal research techniques that have saved thousands of animals and made a real contribution to the fight against human illness."

Scotland has some of the UK 's largest contract testing companies such as Quintiles Ltd in Edinburgh which tests products on a large range of animals such as mice, rats, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and dogs; and Inveresk, also in Edinburgh which tests consumer, agricultural/industrial and pharmaceutical products, according to politics.co.uk.

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