The vast majority of deaths in 2024 and 2025, while encompassing cardiovascular and respiratory disease, were attributable to cancer and dementia – accounting for 74% to 80% of all deaths registered. Over recent years dementia and Alzheimer’s have become the leading cause of death across the UK, comprising over 76,000 deaths across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2024. Future projections don’t look much better – research suggests the numbers could rise to over 219,000 by 2040 without a breakthrough.
Animal testing is often defended as necessary for medical progress, but increasingly the evidence suggests it is cruel, outdated and, in many cases, holding medicine back. At a time when medical research is increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, human-cell modelling and precision medicine, the continued reliance on animal testing raises serious questions about whether regulation is keeping pace with science.
Beagles are usually, but not always, the breed of dog used in testing because of their “friendly and forgiving nature”. These dogs go through something called ‘being bled’, where the dog is usually put under anaesthetic and then drained of blood. The percentage of blood drained varies. In some cases, large volumes of blood are drained from the animal. Campaign groups monitoring laboratory breeding facilities have documented licensed blood collection programmes involving dogs used repeatedly for research supply.
Other tests include drug trials. Dogs, among other animals such as NHPs (non-human primates), horses, rats and mice, are used to test drugs that could potentially benefit human ailments. The issue with this is that animals are often deliberately infected with diseases and then given the drug to test how the disease reacts and what effect it has on the animal. If a drug works, then the test can go to phase 2 and continue until the drug is ready for human trials.
The scientific concern is not only ethical but practical: animal responses often fail to predict human outcomes.
False positives
Some of the clearest examples are drugs that passed toxicity tests on animals but later caused serious harm to humans.
- Isuprel: Developed for asthma treatment, it caused over 3,500 deaths in Britain alone, despite appearing safe in animals, including dogs, all of whom were tested with higher doses than those administered to humans.
- Thalidomide: Famously marketed as a wonder drug used for morning sickness in pregnant women and for anxiety, this showed no toxicity in rats, rabbits, dogs, hamsters, NHPs (non-human primates), cats, armadillos, guinea pigs, swine and ferrets. This drug went on to cause severe birth defects in up to 30,000 infants before it was withdrawn.
- BIA-102474-101: This was developed to treat a wide range of disorders from anxiety to Parkinson’s disease. It caused deep brain haemorrhaging and necrosis in human volunteers during its phase 1 trial after being administered at 1/590th of the safe dose for dogs. One of the volunteers died.
- Fialuridine: This was developed to treat hepatitis B. After being declared safe in mice, rats, dogs and monkeys in doses hundreds of times higher than those given to humans, human trials caused the deaths of five volunteers, with one surviving after receiving a liver transplant.
This is called a false positive – drugs that were deemed safe after passing toxicity tests on animals.
The converse
It must be noted that the majority of drugs tested on animals never make it to human trials, as most fail toxicity tests. This may seem good, but in fact it raises another issue. The flip side of a false positive is a false negative. When a drug does not pass toxicity tests, it is deemed a failure and abandoned. But there are many drugs we use in day-to-day life that, if tested on animals, would not pass toxicity tests due to metabolic differences. This raises the question of how many drugs have been abandoned because they were toxic to animals but could have proved beneficial to humans?
Even studies tracking highly-publicised, animal-based breakthroughs found that very few later became successful human treatments.
This suggests that by relying on animal testing, we are not only subjecting animals to painful procedures but also risking delays in developing treatments that actually work for humans.
Reality behind the laboratories
In 2022, over 4,000 beagles were saved from horrific conditions at an Envigo breeding facility in Cumberland, Virginia following an undercover investigation by PETA. Envigo’s parent company, Inotiv, had to pay $35mn in fines, equivalent to over £25mn – the largest fine in any animal welfare case. The former attending veterinarian, Dawn Marie Gau, was indicted on 17 counts of animal cruelty.
The animals that were supposed to be in the care of the facility were left for days without food, water or human contact. Some were injured when they were rescued. Others had been euthanised without anaesthesia.
360 dead puppies were found. Some had been crushed in cramped cages and left to rot alongside living puppies and their mothers; others had died of pneumonia or hepatitis.
Workers with no veterinary credentials used needles on puppies without pain relief, causing them to scream. Dogs with easily treated conditions were euthanised. Female beagles nursing puppies were denied food.
The facility was shut down after this came to light. Envigo still has facilities in the UK.
This particular instance is only one example of animals being treated cruelly. There are many other companies and facilities shown to neglect animals under their supervision. It is not hard to imagine these animals being viewed as nothing more than test subjects rather than living beings with emotions.
Closer to home
A mere 30-mile drive from me is the Charles River Laboratories facility in Elphinstone, East Lothian. It was sanctioned in 2020 after a Home Office investigation triggered by a whistleblower. It was discovered that many rats were dosed incorrectly after staff failed to read labels correctly during cancer studies.
During an inhalation experiment, rats were exposed to toxic gases exceeding agreed limits. This caused affected rats to mutilate themselves, including biting off their own limbs. Up to 50 rats, including pregnant females, were also crushed to death in a rubbish compressor.
In 2024, campaign reports alleged that animals at this facility and others across the UK had been left to suffer far beyond the point when they should have been euthanised, with some left for three days before being put out of their misery.
Accountability
Companies operating in this manner need to be held to account for their failures, not protected. The Labour government brought in a law that made it illegal to protest peacefully outside certain facilities this year. A government body should not put the protection of companies from protest above accountability for those companies’ actions.
One thing you will come across when looking at these facilities is that they all state they follow government guidelines and care about animal welfare. As history shows, legality does not always equal morality. In America in 1672, it was lawful to kill a slave who resisted capture. This may seem like a strange comparison, but if we allow companies and people to use laws and regulations to justify cruelty, then we are also partly to blame. We have to hold people and companies accountable, especially in the present.
What’s the alternative?
If we care about fighting diseases that affect us all, we should put an end to animal testing. But what is the alternative?
With technological advances and AI, animal testing should become a shameful part of our scientific and medical past. There are already many alternatives that do not require a living body to test drugs, and these can provide more accurate results.
Organs-on-a-chip, human skin models, tools like Tox-GAN, and human-based research can all be used without putting animals through unnecessary suffering. These alternatives also offer greater human-specific accuracy than animal models, which reportedly fail in over 90% of trials.
These alternatives are what need investment. Medical science has evolved over the years and should continue to grow.
What happens next?
There are many charities, animal welfare organisations and protest groups across the globe: Animal Aid, The Marty Project and The Camp Beagle respectively to name a few. A quick Google search will provide names, contact details and ways to get involved locally and internationally. What these animals need from us is pressure – pressure on government officials to recognise how this not only fails animals but may also work against human health. Pressure should also be put on facilities to adopt alternative methods rather than relying on outdated tests.
With modern alternatives proving more accurate, continuing to rely on animal testing is no longer just cruel – it is a choice to remain behind.
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