THE Home Office has been urged to stop issuing blanket licences to animal testing labs where rabbits are being “needlessly” shackled in “medieval” stocks for up to eight hours per experiment.

Campaigners say a hands-off attitude in Whitehall means the Government is failing to properly police animal tests and so prevent suffering to thousands of rabbits a year.

They say a policy of issuing high-level licences to animal labs rather than authorising individual experiments means tests are being carried out when not actually required by regulations.

That “makes a mockery” of the Government’s pledge to reduce the number of tests on animals, the campaigners said last night.

Home Office minister Meg Hillier admitted the high-level policy after a series of questions in Parliament by Lib Dem MPs last month.

The row centres on pyrogenicity tests—experiments designed to see if products likely come into contact with the human bloodstream cause fevers—at four British laboratories.

One of those is Wickham Laboratories in Hampshire, which is currently being investigated by the Government after allegations of malpractice during a range of procedures.

The claims were made by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, which handed a dossier of evidence to the Government last month following an undercover investigation.
rabbitts.jpg
The rabbits used in the tests are clamped by the neck / picture posed by models

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Its appalling. How can the testing be monitored? And although I do Human Biology at university I still find it difficult to comprehend why chemicals/medicines etc that work on animals would have the same effect on humans? They should use life sentence criminals as the guinea pigs, but again there's loopholes for that too!