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A total of 792.724 animals were employed in 2017 in Spain for experimentation and other scientific purposes, including teaching, that is 43.5% less than the 1.403.290 individuals employed in 2009, the first year with official data collected by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
These data show that the number of uses of animals for such activities in 2017 (the last year with available information) was 802.976, of which 792.724 were animals, first used and 10.252 was reused.
Some of those data have been released today in a press conference in Madrid, during which he presented the second annual report of the Agreement of Transparency on the Use of Animals in Experimentation, driven by the Confederation of Scientific Societies of Spain (Cosce) in 2016. The new work was conducted for the second consecutive year by the European Association for Animal Research (EARA, for its acronym in English).
Margarita del Val, a member of the Life Sciences and Health Cosce, indicated that the Agreement of Transparency has as goal that there is “a positive communication between society and researchers”, and argued that the experiments are made to “know how to work the entire organisms, how we get sick and how we fix”, since “there are diseases important that you can only study with living bodies of animals.” But said that researchers “always” first attempt to make your work with “alternative” methods to the use of animals.
Val stated that animal experimentation is conducted by “staff very formed” under the premise of the “three rs”, that is, replacement of animals by alternative methods, reducing the number of animals and refinement of the care and the use of animals, and that experiments are made “with the maximum rigor “.
140 institutions
For its part, Lluís Montoliu, research scientist, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and member of the management Committee of the Centre of Biomedical Research Network on Rare Diseases (CIBER-ER, ISCIII), commented that Spain it was the second european country to launch an agreement of transparency about animal experimentation after that Uk do so in 2014.
Currently, a total of 140 institutions have signed up to that agreement (between research centers , public research bodies, universities, enterprises , science parks, hospitals , associations of patients and scientific societies ), which was considered “a success”, taking into account that all of them exposed in their websites that work with animals when there is a “sensitivity” social about animal experimentation and the law “protects” in these purposes.
Montoliu stressed that the decline from 43.5 per cent in the use of animals for experimentation from 2009 shows that scientists comply with the recommendations on animal welfare .
Using data from 2017, indicated that 83% of the animals were used for scientific research, (ahead of the regulatory use and teaching) and that in 87% of cases there was pain or suffering mild or moderate. By species, 83% were rodent , 11% bird and 11% fish , while more than 400 were primates is not human.
Survey
finally, Javier Guillen, representative of the EARA and the managing director for Europe and Latin America of the International Association for the Assessment and Accreditation of the Care of Laboratory Animals ( Aaalac International), presented the results of two surveys sent out during the second quarter of this year to 136 organizations then adhered to the agreement of transparency, which responded to 104 (80 used animals and 24 do not) on three of the four commitments of the agreement:
-Talk with clear , when, how and why they use animals in research;
-Provide information appropriate to the media and the general public about the conditions in which the research is conducted that requires the use of animal models and the results that are obtained.
-to Promote initiatives that generate a greater knowledge and understanding in the society on the use of animals in scientific research
All the organisations surveyed have published a statement on their website explaining their policy on the use of animals. And 80% of them have been offered the option of perform visits outside the animal houses .
