UK Home Office publishes 2017 statistics on animal experiments

The ‘Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals, Great Britain’ was published by the UK Home Office on the 19^th of July 2018.
The figures show that 3.79 million animal experiments took place in Great Britain in 2017, a slight decrease of 4% compared to the previous year. Of these, 1.90 million (50%) related to the creation or breeding of genetically altered animals who were not used in further procedures, while the remaining 1.89 million experiments (50%) were experiments on animals for various purposes. These purposes were basic research (55%); translational/applied research (17%), regulatory tests (27%), and others (1%).
In 2017, there were increases in the number of experiments conducted on horses (up 18% to 10,600) and cats (up 4% to 198 experiments) in Great Britain. However, there were decreases in the use of other species, including mice (down 10% to 1.1 million), rats (down 2% to 234,000), non-human primates (down 17% to 2,960) and dogs (down 22% to 3,847).
Almost 700,000 experiments (32%) carried out in Great Britain in 2017 were deemed to have caused moderate or severe suffering to the animals involved; moderate or severe suffering was alse experienced by 5% of the genetically altered animals not used for further procedures. Moderate suffering is described by Directive 2010/63/EU as causing short term moderate pain or distress or long-lasting mild pain or distress to animals while severe suffering is described as causing severe pain or distress or long-lasting moderate pain or distress to animals.