This month, The Daily Mail released undercover footage from inside two
UK medical and toxicity testing centres. I have been involved with several charities that campaign to stop beagle use in testing for many years, but despite that, the imagery was no less shocking or saddening. The footage depicted beagles, pigs, rabbits and long-tailed macaques being used in a variety of medical and toxicology tests and experiments.
It is estimated that more than 100 million animals globally are used in such tests ever year. In 2024, we know that 2,646 regulated experiments were carried out on dogs alone in Great Britain. Of these, 2,488 involved beagle testing, with 1,549 beagles bred specifically for this purpose in the UK.
All of these experiments were approved by the UK Government and were within the existing law.
There is a wide variety of statistical data available, painting a varied picture of the usefulness of using animals in medical testing.
PETA and The Humane Research Trust claim that a recent study showed 95% of all new drugs deemed ‘safe and effective’ by animal tests failed in human clinical trials. The merit of controversial trials, such as FST (forced swim tests) on mice and other small animals to test antidepressants in humans, has long been questioned. After decades of HIV experiments on primates, there has been little or no success in developing a human vaccine or effective, durable cure.Success of outcomes aside, is it ethically right in our modern age to
continue to inflict such suffering on other sentient creatures?
Time for a radical approach
In 2024, one in every three animal experiments conducted in British laboratories were deemed to cause ‘moderate’ or ‘severe’ suffering to the animals used in the experiments, with pain relief normally withheld due to the potential interference with data.
Given the advancements in non-animal research methods and New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), such as computational modelling and the use of 3D human cell cultures, the case for the continued widespread use of animals in medical testing is, in my view, extremly thin, and for toxicity testing, non-existent. Labour made several fairly weak pledges within their manifesto to “phase out” or “significantly reduce testing
on dogs and primates” by 2030. These will, in all likelihood, be about as successful as “smash the gangs”, “economic stability”, “cut your bills by £300”, and “End the Tory chaos and sleeze” … the latter is really not ageing well at all.
I believe there is a huge opportunity for Reform to put animal welfare, in all its forms, at the front of our political offering and take as radical an approach to this topic as we are to immigration, lowering the cost of living and tackling crime.
As with many of our country’s
problems, the solutions are there, often technological, but they require bold and decisive changes to accepted norms.
With very limited exceptions, the UK should be leading the way in ending all testing and experimentation on animals, and encourage our world-class universities to become the centre of innovation and excellence in New Approach Methodologies, consigning the suffering of animals used in toxicology testing and medical experimentation to the history books.
Thomas Gargrave
Reform Dorset
