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Government-Required Animal Testing: Overview

Government regulations in most countries require some animal-based toxicity testing as a condition for the importation or sale of pesticides, industrial chemicals, drugs and vaccines, genetically manipulated foods, and some consumer products. Depending on the substance in question, its likely toxicity, and the degree of anticipated human or environmental exposure, as many as 50 separate animal-poisoning studies may be required.

Animal Numbers and Suffering

Statistics published by government authorities and research-oversight bodies in North America and Europe reveal that the vast majority of the cruelest and most painful animal experiments are conducted to satisfy government-mandated testing requirements. In these tests, animals such as birds, dogs, fish, guinea pigs, mice, rabbits, rats, and even monkeys are forced to swallow or inhale massive doses of a test substance—which can cause severe abdominal pain, paralysis, swelling and ulceration of the skin and/or eyes, convulsions and seizures, and bleeding from the nose, mouth, and genitals—before they are poisoned to death or killed by the experimenter.

In 2000, regulatory testing accounted for 81 percent of Canadian experiments known to “cause pain near, at, or above the pain tolerance threshold of unanesthetized, conscious animals”. Although at least one research-oversight body acknowledges that such invasive procedures are “highly questionable or unacceptable, irrespective of the significance of the anticipated results,” these tests are still permitted—even required—by government regulators around the world. In fact, lethal-poisoning (“acute”) studies accounted for one-third of all toxicity tests carried out in U.K. labs in 2002. Other common tests involve dosing an animal daily with a test chemical for one month (“subacute”), three months (“subchronic”), or for most of the animal’s life (“chronic”) to determine what kind of harmful health