Animal experiments in the UK
Nearly 3 million experiments are carried out on animals in the UK each year.
Animal testing is still carried out for many day-to-day products including some household product ingredients, medicines, vaccine development, industrial chemicals, foods and even some cosmetic ingredients.
Despite the fact that animal studies aren’t a reliable indicator of how a drug or chemical will work in people, a staggering 2.54 million scientific procedures* were carried out on animals in Great Britain in 2025.
Thousands of sentient creatures suffer and die in British laboratories every day. We don’t know what life is really like for these animals because Section 24 of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 – the so-called ‘Secrecy Clause’ – keeps it quiet.
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The story so far…
How far we've come…
We are a key partner of the Welfare and Protection Stakeholder Group that meets with the Home Office regularly to hold them accountable.
In 2023, we celebrated 30 years of helping ethical shoppers find cruelty-free brands in our Compassionate Shopping Guide.
We’ve been campaigning for better transparency in animal testing so that the public can know all the facts.
In 2025, we released A Tail of Two Dogs, an animated film exposing the stark contrast between a family beagle’s life and one used in laboratory testing.
