Attitudes Towards Experimentation On Live Animals
Commissioned by New Scientist, this poll of United Kingdom residents explored attitudes toward animal experimentation and found that overall, 24% agree and 64% disagree that scientists should be allowed to conduct experiments on animals.
Research Highlights
- When asked “cold”, 64 percent of people say they disagree with animal experimentation. But including a preamble explaining why scientists believe it will hasten progress in medicine produces a slim majority in favour of animal research. This represents a huge swing of 22 percentage points.
- More women than men are opposed to animal experiments–71 percent versus 57 percent on the “cold start” question.
- The only group that clearly supports animal experiments on this same question are the tiny proportion of people who take part in blood sports or wear fur coats, with 62 percent in favour.
- 35 percent of people say they, or a close family member, have taken a prescribed drug for a serious illness in the past 2 years or so. But only around one in six of this group realise that the drugs will have been tested on animals.
- 65 percent of people are prepared for mice to suffer pain, illness or surgery in experiments to develop a drug to cure childhood leukaemia; 52 percent would let monkeys be used in the same experiments.
- 56 percent are prepared for mice to suffer in experiments to develop an AIDS vaccine, but only 44 percent back the use of monkeys in these experiments.
- Just 47 percent are prepared for mice to suffer pain in experiments to develop a new painkilling drug; the figure for monkeys falls to 35 percent.
- 61 percent oppose the use of mice in experiments to study the sense of hearing, if the animals suffer in any way. This increases to 75 percent for monkeys.
- 68 percent think mice should not be used in harmful tests on the toxicity of a garden insecticide.
- One in 20 people are prepared to let monkeys die to test cosmetics.
[Excerpted from MORI survey summary]