Experiments on animals soar to 3 million

ANIMAL testing in Britain has reached a 15-year high and is set to go on rising, the government said yesterday.

The growing use of genetically-modified mice in scientific research last year pushed the total number of animals used in laboratory testing to more than three million for the first time since 1991.

I wonder if this is the fault of the EU. In October 2006 I blogged that because of new EU rules tens of millions of animals were facing painful deaths because the EU wanted to retest chemicals, some of which had been on the market for more than 25 years.

I think that animal testing is needed but I don’t think it is needed on this scale. 3 million per year would be a genocide if it was humans being killed.