Call to ban primate experiments in the EU

Animal Defenders International announced that legislators from the EU are proposing a change to the regulations that govern animal testing in the EU - Directive 86/609 - that would end all primate experimentation.

Dr Caroline Lucas, Green Party MEP for South-East England and Vice-President of the European Parliament’s Animal Welfare Intergroup, said: “Medical and commercial experiments on primates are cruel, unnecessary and, according to increasing numbers of doctors themselves, unhelpful and often misleading. This Written Declaration seeks to ban them in line with the European Commission’s aspiration to make the EU a world leader in animal welfare standards, and I urge my fellow MEPs to sign up and demand legislative proposals to make outdated and outmoded tests on living primates a thing of the past.” Dr Caroline Lucas has recently drafted a set of proposals to end the requirement for industrial toxicity tests on animals.

A new report, called ‘Primate Nations’ has highlighted the suffering of Europe’s 10,000 laboratory primates and describes how these tests can be replaced with advanced techniques based upon human data. Dr Michael Coleman, Senior Lecturer in Toxicology of Department of Pharmacy, Aston University, commented: “As well as the ethical considerations, scientifically primates are simply not close enough to us to act as good experimental models and we should be promoting replacement of animal work with human cellular systems. We must leave behind the intellectual laziness of relying on animal models and invest in human-cellular based alternatives for the future.”

There is a complementary campaign in the US where ADI, an animal advocacy group, is lobbying members of the House of Representatives. Last Friday, HSUS ran a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the retirement of the chimpanzees now used in experiments (there are about 1300). There is no exact count for all primates in the US, but estimates are between 50 and 80 thousand for labs and breeding centers combined.

See: MEPs lead call to end experiments on primates in the EU