Animal experiments
Around 3 million experiments are carried out on animals in the UK each year. Find out more about what we are doing and how you can help.
Animal experiments
Around 3 million experiments are carried out on animals in the UK each year. Find out more about what we are doing and how you can help.
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.
The story so far…
How far we’ve come…
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We’ve held active boycotts against companies associated with animal testing through their corporate ownership.
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We've worked with welfare organisations to deliver co-ordinated lobbying on animal sentience and the regulation of animal research laboratories.
Next steps…
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We want the UK Government to commit to accelerating the phase-out of animal testing
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We need improved transparency around animal testing and for section 24 to be repealed.
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We need governments and industries to invest in the development and use of non-animal methods (NAMs).
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We want the UK to have a proper household product animal testing ban so everyone can live in a cruelty-free home.
Actions and updates…
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.
The film was viewed over 20 million times, earned two national award shortlists, and won Silver People’s Choice at the Smiley Charity Film Awards- showing the scale of public outcry against animal testing.
We’ve been campaigning for better transparency in animal testing so that the public can know all the facts.
Our 2025 Forgotten Lives campaign highlighted the hundreds of thousands of animals potentially bred and killed for British science each year without being used — numbers that haven’t been recorded since 2018. Thanks to you, the government will now collect and publish them again from 2028.
In 2023, we celebrated 30 years of helping ethical shoppers find cruelty-free brands in our Compassionate Shopping Guide.
For World Day for Animals in Laboratories (WDAIL) 2024, we launched our brand new Compassionate Shopping Guide website and our new look to help even more people shop cruelty-free.
We are a key partner of the Welfare and Protection Stakeholder Group that meets with the Home Office regularly to hold them accountable.
In November 2024, the UK Government published its strategy to phase out animal testing and we continue to push them to develop this quicker and further.