The EU needs to back its ambition to end animal testing with cash

You have full access to this article via your institution. A toxicology test in the late 1970s using a live rat. Credit: James L. Amos/Corbis/Getty Article 13 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union proudly states that animals are sentient beings and that full regard should be paid to their welfare. And yet, in 2015–23, more than 15 million animals were used in the EU for regulatory testing. Of those, almost 40% were used to assess whether chemical products in industry, pharmaceuticals and agriculture are safe for human health and the environment. (This is separate to the use of animals in scientific research procedures: the dominant application of animal testing, for which numbers are much higher.) Although the number of animals used for chemical safety testing is declining, overall progress in reducing and eventually replacing animals, while refining procedures to minimize their suffering (known as the 3Rs framework), is by all accounts too slow. In 2023, animal-welfare organizations in Europe, backed by more than one million citizens , urged the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to accelerate the use of non-animal alternatives in chemical safety testing. This was partly in response to concerns that EU countries are not fully implementing a 2013 law that prohibits animals being used for testing ingredients in cosmetics. …