WDAIL 2022: Marking World Day for Animals In Laboratories, we bring you a round-up of some notable animal protection groups and the campaigns you can get behind to help end barbaric and futile experimentation on mice and other lab animals.

1. Cures not Cruelty by Animal Justice Project

Our friends at Animal Justice Project (AJP) have been making huge strides in fighting against animal exploitation in farming, exposing so-called ‘high welfare’ practices and promoting plant-based food production and ethical veganism, but vivisection remains - as always - a top campaign priority. Few other organisations have focused so much on animal experimentation in scientific research, and as such they really know their stuff.

Cures not Cruelty - AJP’s ongoing anti-vivisection campaign - aims to educate the public not just on the futility of animal research, but on promoting the effective prevention of diseases such as cancer and heart disease for which charities like British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK continue to fund outdated animal-based research.

AJP provides factsheets and research on its campaign landing page for grassroots groups and individuals to include in their outreach and tabling events, plus a template message to send to research charities. 

They also play a key role in organising the UK’s annual WDAIL march which this year fell on the day itself, April 24, and took place in Cambridge. Said AJP via their official Instagram:

“Millions of non-human animals are exploited and killed in laboratories every single year. With over 192,000,000 used for scientific purposes worldwide in 2015. (This is the world’s most reliable figure to date). 

“According to Government figures, a total of 2,900,000 experiments were carried out in Great Britain in 2020, of the total number of experiments conducted in the UK, only 11% were required by regulators with 54% of all experiments conducted in universities, often using taxpayers’ money. A total of 4,340 experiments were conducted on dogs in 2020, with 4,270 of them being on beagles.”

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2. Animal Free Research UK

Animal Free Research UK may seem like a new organisation, but it has in fact been around for nearly half a century, founded in 1970 by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), which itself became Cruelty Free International, in honour of its former president Dr Walter Hadwen.

Rather than running campaigns on specific ethical issues, Animal Free Research UK takes a pragmatic view of animal experimentation as being not only futile but counterproductive to the advancement of medical science. 

As such, they award grants to scientists to help find alternatives to the use of animal models, adding to the mounting evidence that advanced techniques involving stem cells, organs-on-a-chip and 2D/3D cell cultures are vastly more effective in finding new cures for diseases such as cancer, diabetes and chronic pain.

“We owe it to the millions of animals who have suffered for negligible human benefit to end the century of unimaginable pain in UK laboratories. If Britain is to become a science superpower it must lead by example. It must accelerate the use of animal free research and aim for target zero animal experiments, starting today,” said Carla Owen, CEO of Animal Free Research UK.

3. Cruelty Free International

With a long history spanning more than a century, Cruelty Free International (CFI) is arguably one of the leading organisations working to end the belief that animals are needed for experiments. Although CFI is usually more commonly associated with battling animal testing for cosmetics, with its instantly recognisable ‘leaping bunny’ certification programme, the worldwide organisation also shines a spotlight on chemical and scientific research.

CFI is itself not a charity, a fact which it says allows it to campaign freely across a range of areas and with various strategies that would otherwise not be possible. This includes the full breadth of campaigning, political lobbying, pioneering undercover investigations, scientific and legal expertise and corporate responsibility.

According to CFI, more than 190 million animals are used in research and testing worldwide every year, with hundreds of thousands of those suffering and dying needlessly as a result of medical and scientific research.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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