The BUAV launch scathing attack on MEPs after the recent European Parliamentary vote
On Tuesday 5 May MEPs voted in the European Parliament to amend an outdated legislation goverining animal testing in Europe.
The Parliament has significantly weakened the already inadequate proposals of the European Commission to revise the 23 year old law. If the Parliament gets its way:
- Researchers could be allowed to cause animals suffering which is both severe and prolonged, an obscenity in a civilised society
- They will be allowed to repeatedly use the same animal in painful experiments
- They will be able to use non-human primates for just about any purpose, not simply life-threatening or debilitating diseases as the Commission proposed
- There will be no incentive to stop the capture of primates in the wild, which causes them immense distress, for breeding for research
- Researchers will in effect be allowed to determine for which experiments they need governmental permission, by deciding how to categorise the likely suffering
- They will not have to carry out retrospective assessments of experiments – whether from the animal welfare or scientific point of view – in the vast majority of cases
- There will be no strategy to bring forward the day when animal experiments no longer take place, as everyone claims they want
The BUAV are outraged and will keep everyone updated as to how to take further action.
