Today, April 24, is World Day for Animals in Laboratories, highlighting the grotesque cruelty that continues to maim, torment and kill animals in laboratories and teaching facilities all over the world.

Even though Australia enacted some bans on using animals for cosmetics testing in 2020, experimenting on animals is far from a thing of the past. Thanks to scant reporting and wildly different state laws, the exact number of animals languishing in laboratories is hard to pinpoint, but a conservative estimate is that 10 million animals are used in Australian laboratories every year. They may be forced to ingest chemicals, perform unnatural actions, and endure torment to satisfy human curiosity, secure more funding, and meet regulatory requirements.

Animal Testing Is Unkind to All Kinds

Almost no species is immune to a life of confinement and torture in the name of flawed ‘science’. Dogs, rabbits, mice, primates, kangaroos, fish, and birds are just some of the species who suffer.

Confined to barren, enrichment-devoid cages and tanks, these animals are burnt, cut open, force-fed toxins, impregnated and more before being killed – all for results that rarely translate to improving human health outcomes.

Dogs and Others, Choking on Chemicals

Beagles

Ask any beagle guardian, and they’ll tell you they’re a gentle, obedient breed. Sadly, this temperament is exactly why they’re selected for invasive toxicity testing.

Every year, toxicity testing sees countless dogs forced to inhale or ingest chemicals such as pesticides for regulatory approval and product development.

During these tests, dogs may be forced to wear tight masks and inhale toxic chemicals into their lungs for hours at a time, sometimes for days on end. Many suffer severe lung damage and chronic pain. Even if they survive, they are almost always killed afterwards.

Fish

Fish are like us in all the important ways, like feeling pain and emotions and experiencing self-awareness. Despite this, every year, hundreds of thousands are poisoned with chemicals such as biocides and pesticides in an attempt to see how deadly they are to the environment. Barbaric as it is, this form of testing is still required by law for most types of chemicals.

Fish are intelligent, social creatures, but they’re trapped in barren tanks in testing settings, forced to suffer in ways that no living being should ever experience.

Birds

Birds are also common victims of cruel and outdated – but regulator-mandated – toxicity testing, supposedly for “environmental protection.”

In pesticide safety tests, mallard ducks and bobwhite quails are forced to ingest pesticides through a painful procedure called gavage, where a tube is inserted down their throats to deliver the potentially toxic chemicals directly into their stomachs. It’s like foie gras production—but using potentially poisonous substances instead of fat and grain. 

Typically given in high doses, these chemicals can cause organ damage, seizures, and neurological symptoms. The birds often succumb to the poison and they die, or they’re killed anyhow and cut open to assess toxicity by examining the damage to their organs.

Rabbits

Reproductive toxicity tests aim to see if chemicals cause congenital disorders or developmental abnormalities in the developing baby, but because animal results rarely provide human-relevant results, they’re often as irrelevant as they are cruel.

Rabbits are force-fed chemicals through tubes inserted down their throats while pregnant. Huge, repeated chemical doses make these gentle animals sick and can cause harm to both the mother and foetus.

Afterwards, the animals are killed, and their bodies and offspring are dissected to study growth, survival, and deformities. Sometimes, the offspring are born only to face the same fate as their mothers.

Curiosity Experiments – Painful and Pointless

In laboratories, macaques, marmosets and other monkeys are bred, separated from their babies, and denied their basic needs. As if being confined to barren enclosures, deprived of sunlight, trees to climb, and the ability to express natural behaviours such as foraging for food wasn’t bad enough; intelligent primates are also routinely subjected to painful experiments.

Experimenters drill holes into primates’ skulls and place implants into their brains before restraining them for hours on end, their heads bolted into place, as they are forced to engage in tasks on a computer screen.

Imagine being starved, crying out in frustration and fear as you endure painful experiments without hope of escape. This is the grim reality for primates used as test subjects worldwide.

Mice

Mice may be small, but they’re complex individuals. Despite this, mice are often subjected to horrific experiments, such as enduring painful procedures where holes are drilled into their skulls, exposing their brains, and plastic caps are glued over the openings. In some tests, they’re drugged unconscious while a powerful pulse is blasted into their exposed brains, simulating a traumatic brain injury.

Mice are confined to tiny cages the size of a child’s shoebox, which causes them constant stress and suffering.

The Future of Science is Animal-Free

Aside from the horror it perpetuates, experiments on animals are entirely avoidable. Ostensibly performed to gather data for human safety or diseases, most of what’s gleaned from these experiments is actually irrelevant to us.

Intricate differences between species can mean one is highly sensitive to a chemical while others remain unaffected, meaning that chemicals dangerous to humans may go undetected in tests on animals.

The average time from discovery of a new drug to approval is about 14 years. The failure rate during this process is more than 95 per cent, and the cost per successful drug can be US$1 billion or more. Meanwhile, as much as 89 per cent of preclinical research isn’t reproducible. Clearly, there is a problem with the current paradigm for developing and testing drugs and getting them to market, and experiments on animals have been identified as one of the contributing factors.

Innovative scientists are leading the way with humane, human-relevant methods. Cutting-edge lab-grown human organ models, exposure systems that simulate real-life breathing of aerosols and gases, and advanced computational models that predict how substances behave in the lungs can all replace toxicity testing.

Similarly, organs on chips, computer modelling, and the use of human volunteers (who, unlike other animals, give their consent!) all exist but lack investment.

PETA’s Research Modernisation Deal provides a blueprint for kinder, more relevant science. It’s time for companies and regulators to move forward and end barbaric animal use.  

You Can Help Empty the Cages!

Today, tomorrow, and every day, the animals languishing in laboratories need a hero – and that hero can be you!

Share what you learned here with others, follow our work on social media, commit to cruelty-free shopping, and, of course, go vegan.

Please also sign our petition urging the government to mandate an end to all experiments on animals.