Parliamentarians at Westminster station are being met with a surprising sight on their commutes – a massive beagle in a cage who urges passersby to help end cruel and useless animal testing. Animal rights group PETA has strategically placed the pleading pup just around the corner from the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street.
It’s part of its campaign calling on the government to adopt its ‘Research Modernisation Deal‘. The strategy sets out an end to animal testing and a pivot to human-relevant research methods.
Animal testing: campaign calls for an end ‘cruel and useless experiments’
Every year, British laboratories bleed, poison, deprive food to, isolate, and mutilate, millions of animals. In short: they subject them to immense psychological suffering and physical pain. Researchers breed and discard millions more as “surplus” because, for example, they were not of the desired sex or lacked certain disease characteristics.
PETA has revealed a slew of atrocities in the experimentation industry. Every year, the industry forces countless dogs to inhale or ingest chemicals, including pesticides, for regulatory approval and product development. During these tests, companies may force dogs may to wear tight masks and inhale toxic chemicals into their lungs for hours at a time, sometimes for days on end. Many suffer severe lung damage and chronic pain. Even if they survive, they almost always kill them afterwards.
At highly regarded universities, experimenters drill holes into primates’ skulls and place implants into their brains. They do so before restraining them for hours on end, their heads bolted into place, as they force them to engage in tasks on a computer screen:
Time for the Labour Party to live up to its manifesto promise
In June 2024, the Labour Party released its manifesto, pledging to work towards phasing out testing on animals. Moreover, it committed to “partner with scientists, industry, and civil society” to achieve this goal. PETA has since called on the party to adopt the Research Modernisation Deal, a 6-step strategy to end all animal experimentation.
PETA’s head of science policy Dr Julia Baines said:
Monkeys, dogs, rabbits, and other animals are being caged and tormented right now in horrific experiments that are holding back science, not advancing it. PETA is calling on the government to keep its promise to phase out cruel and unreliable tests on animals and switch to cutting-edge techniques that actually help humans.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits. For more information, please visit peta.org.uk or follow PETA on Facebook, X, TikTok, or Instagram.
Featured image and additional images via Harvey Giles Photography
