As it’s World Day for Animals In Laboratories today- PETA members have congregated outside of the Home Office- many of whom wore monkey masks.
'Monkeys' were outside of the Home Office today
Why? Experimenters are allegedly attempting to change the category of suffering given to neurological experiments on primates from ‘severe’ to ‘moderate’.
The members delivered an open letter to the Home Office with over 40,000 signatures asking the government to reject the attempts made to reclassify the severity and to end experiments on animals altogether.
"The suffering experienced by sensitive animals during these experiments is severe and should be categorised as such. Experimenters need to stop trying to downplay the pain and distress to which animals are subjected", says PETA Science Policy Adviser Dr Julia Baines. "PETA is urging the Home Office to end these fruitless and obsolete monkey torture sessions and move instead towards more relevant and humane computer-based research methods, human-derived models, and advanced scanning and imaging techniques."
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that "animals are not ours to experiment on" – notes that neurological experiments can involve cementing bolts to monkeys' skulls, implanting electrodes into monkeys’ brains, and keeping them hungry or thirsty.
PETA also reminds us that they are sometimes confined to restraint chairs and forced to complete repetitive behavioural tasks for long periods of time too.
According to the organisation, if the severity categorisation was lowered to ‘moderate’ this would result in less scrutiny of experimenters by the Animals in Science Committee. There might also be fewer restrictions on reusing monkeys in experiments, and less frequent inspections of facilities.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.
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