Shocking numbers of animals harmed in laboratories in Great Britain
A government report published today reveals how more than 2.9 million animals were used in more than 3 million experiments in Great Britain in 2021.
Posted 30 Jun 2022

Posted on the 23rd September 2016
Animal Aid can reveal that the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) played a central role in a series of gruesome experiments on female sheep. Some of these are reported to have gone seriously wrong, which resulted in animals suffering major organ failure and an animal dying on the operating table.
The experiments were conducted at the RVC in London and involved researchers from the RVC and other establishments. In one series of experiments, five sheep were to have had their wombs surgically removed and then grafted back in. The ewes were to have been kept alive for a short while, without recovering consciousness, and then killed with an overdose of barbiturates. The ‘procedure’ was conducted, not with the aim of improving the health and well-being of sheep, but to try to improve human fertility.
The experiments did not go as planned. The blunders and mishaps detailed in a paper by the researchers themselves, included the following:
Worryingly, the authors concluded in the same paper: ‘we are now ready to move towards the human setting’.
The research, conducted between January and June 2013, came to Animal Aid’s attention through a successful Freedom of Information (FOI) request for RVC Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body (AWERB) reports. In a batch of papers, dating from late 2015, it was reported that another sheep experiment went badly wrong and two sheep died under anaesthetic. They were sent for a post mortem that identified the problem as being how the sheep were positioned during the operation, a shortened starvation period and inadequate monitoring during anaesthesia.
Jessamy Korotoga, Animal Aid’s Anti-Vivisection Campaign Manager says
‘It is shocking and profoundly disturbing that experiments to remove and re-graft wombs in living sheep have been performed at the Royal Veterinary College. The public expects a veterinary college to heal animals, not to harm them.
‘That the RVC has an animal research programme that uses thousands of animals a year will come as startling news to many people. And their mood is unlikely to be improved when they learn that the intended beneficiaries of these veterinary college experiments are not animals but people; or by the researchers’ own accounts of mishaps and blunders.’
A government report published today reveals how more than 2.9 million animals were used in more than 3 million experiments in Great Britain in 2021.
Posted 30 Jun 2022
Watch our new animation all about animal experiments!
Posted 28 Jun 2022
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