For the second year in a row, Germany is the country in the EU with the highest number of animals used for scientific purposes. This is according to a report1 recently published by the EU Commission for 2020. The German Animal Welfare Federation criticizes that Germany is doing too little to reduce the number of laboratory animals and to replace animal experiments with methods that do not cause suffering.
"The statistics once again put our country in a bitter first place. Despite immense progress in the development of alternative methods, animal experiments are still the order of the day; year after year, countless animals die as a result of methods that are no longer socially or scientifically appropriate," comments Tilo Weber, expert on alternative methods to animal experiments at the German Animal Welfare Federation. "The slight decline in the latest figures is due to the lockdowns in spring 2020, when many test series were discontinued, but certainly not to better policies - basically, nothing has changed. The German government must finally take the EU target to reduce animal testing seriously and present the strategy it promised in the coalition agreement!"
Almost a fifth of all uses in Germany alone
The total figures listed in the statistics for the EU Member States and Norway remain at a high level despite the discontinuation of experiments in 2020: the Commission counts a total of 8,054,930 uses of animals for research and experimental purposes in 2020 compared to 8,715,224 in 2019. Over 7.9 million animals were used for the first time, while almost 117,000 animals were used again. With 1,536,834 uses (19.1 percent of the total number), Germany ranks first in animal consumption for the second time in a row - ahead of France with 18.8 percent and Norway with 17.5 percent. In addition, 360,806 animals were not used directly in experiments in Germany, but for the creation and maintenance of genetically modified animal lines. This is more than half of the 686,628 animals used for this purpose in the entire EU plus Norway. Mice (4,014,571) and fish (2,222,069) were used most frequently, but also primates (7,316), dogs (19,412) and cats (3,959). Almost 800,000 animals suffered the highest level of pain, suffering, distress and harm. The EU figures do not include animals killed for organ and tissue removal or surplus animals.
EU Commission and German government must act
At the beginning of the year, more than 1.2 million EU citizens called for a Europe without animal experiments in a citizens' initiative supported by the German Animal Welfare Federation. The EU Commission must now respond to this. However, the German Animal Welfare Federation also believes that the German government has a duty: until a complete phase-out is achieved, the promotion of animal-free alternative methods must be massively expanded and, at the very least, severely stressful animal experiments and experiments on non-human primates must be banned immediately.
Source:
1 "Summary Report on the statistics on the use of animals for scientific purposes in the Member States of the European Union and Norway in 2020"
