Ouch! That hurts

摘要

Some experiments on animals inevitably inflict pain. Yet no one knows how many suffer this way, or how severely. Now activists in the US are hoping that this is about to change. There is plenty of data on animal experiments. In Britain, the Home Office has just published its annual statistics on the use of animals in research, and the 1999 figures make for an exhaustively informative read. You can learn, for example, that one greyhound and 492 606 mice were used for biological research. You can also see that, compared with 1998, the number of experiments done on cats rose by 29 per cent, or that eye irritation tests fell by 11 per cent.