Tuesday, December 24, 2024

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

In 1975, when she was just a year old, a chimpanzee later named Montessa was sold to a New Mexico laboratory owned by the U.S. government.

Unbelievably, nearly 50 years later, Montessa is still locked in the same laboratory.

Instead of growing up in the wild in Africa (where she was likely born before being captured), with a community that would have included her mother, father and siblings, Montessa spent the first three decades of her life being used for harmful biomedical research experiments. During that time, four of her five babies were taken from her. In 2015, when our legal petition and other efforts successfully ended chimpanzee experiments in the U.S., Montessa was not moved to a sanctuary, unlike many other chimpanzees in similar research facilities. Instead, she was left to languish in the laboratory where she’d been for five decades.

Then last month, we got the incredible news that Montessa and the 22 other chimps at the New Mexico lab would move to Chimp Haven, a lush 200-acre sanctuary in Louisiana. At 51 years old, Montessa will finally get a better life.

Because laboratories and research breeding facilities are closed-door operations, we don’t often have names and faces to identify the animals who suffer in the animal testing industry. But we know that there are millions of dogs, mice, monkeys and other animals like Montessa who need our help, and we continue to work tirelessly on their behalf. Over the last year, we have made great progress toward reducing and ultimately ending animal testing across the globe.

Creating a better life for monkeys and apes. We’ll continue to fight for these intelligent, inquisitive animals.

Phasing out animal tests. In 2024, we successfully pushed to swap animal tests for non-animal methods in multiple countries.

  • Washington became the 12th U.S. state to ban the sale of cosmetics tested on animals, joining California, Hawai’i, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon and Virginia.
  • Brazil and the U.S. have adopted effective non-animal solutions for detecting contaminants in medicines that can fully replace two invasive and outdated animal tests. The “monocyte activation test” uses donated human blood instead of restrained rabbits to detect fever-inducing contaminants, while the “recombinant Factor C test” uses a synthetic protein instead of blood taken from wild horseshoe crabs (a process that is involves removing the crabs from the ocean and is often fatal).
  • A landmark decision in India will spare animals from obsolete testing for veterinary vaccines, demonstrating industry and regulator support for moving away from animal testing. And together with our Animal Free Safety Assessment Collaboration partners, we organized in-person meetings with key regulatory and industry leaders in Indonesia and South Korea to discuss opportunities to support the acceptance of non-animal tests for human vaccines against diseases such as Tetanus, Hepatitis, Polio and Diphtheria. Several hundred representatives from regulatory agencies and industry attended webinars organized by AFSA and our partners focused on how best to advance non-animal methods in India and across the globe.
  • Following years of discussions with policymakers in Brazil, the country’s president signed Brazil’s first-ever chemicals management bill into law, which limits animal testing to a “last resort” and mandates that a plan be drafted to phase out animal testing for chemicals.
  • Building on our success in helping drive Canada, the European Union and South Korea to develop roadmaps or timetables for phasing out testing on animals, we continue to work collaboratively with regulators, industry and other interest holders to formalize ambitious, actionable and well-resourced plans to accelerate the transition to non-animal testing.
  • We filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, requesting that the agency make it clear to companies that animal testing isn’t legally required for the approval of new drugs. Despite publicly indicating a commitment to non-animal test methods, the agency’s regulations and guidance documents for pharmaceutical companies continue to emphasize using animals for drug testing. The changes we are petitioning for would clarify that this testing isn’t required protecting countless dogs, rats and other animals from unnecessary and outdated tests.

Advancing dialogue and collaboration around non-animal methods. We remain committed to changing the status quo around non-animal methods. In 2024, we hosted numerous workshops and webinars with research funders, regulators, industry and other scientific thought leaders around the world and published in multiple scientific journals.

Building confidence in non-animal science: We are helping build trust in modern scientific approaches that do not harm animals.

  • The multi-year AFSA Collaboration to create a comprehensive Master Class in Animal-Free Safety Assessment Master Class in Animal-Free Safety Assessment came to fruition this year with the release the final modules. Our free, first-of-its-kind online curriculum is designed to assist companies, regulators, testing labs and others to embrace the ever-growing toolbox of animal-free approaches to product safety assessment to fully move away from animal testing. The AFSA Master Class has already attracted over 1,200 users from 70 different countries.
  • Our work to shine a light on “animal reliance bias” in scientific publications—whereby some journals require non-animal researchers to conduct new animal experiments to “validate” their findings—helped spark a global collaboration whose work earned a 2024 LUSH Prize for “Best Science Collaboration.”

Holding laboratories and research breeding facilities accountable. As long as animals are bred for and used in experiments, we will continue to push for more transparency and accountability in the animal testing and research industries.

  • Inotiv, one of the largest animal testing companies in the U.S., will pay more than $35 million, including an $11 million fine for violating the Animal Welfare Act, the largest in U.S. history. The fines stem from violations at a dog breeding facility in Virginia owned by Envigo RMS, a subsidiary of Inotiv. In 2022, as a result of these violations and a subsequent federal investigation, our team removed more than 4,000 beagles from the facility, the vast majority of whom were destined for animal testing facilities.
  • A new Virginia state law created a taskforce of legislators, animal protection groups, researchers and others to determine how best to inform the public about what’s going on behind closed doors at publicly funded animal testing facilities in the state. We are hopeful that the taskforce’s recommendations to the Virginia legislature result in a meaningful increase in transparency and accountability at such facilities.

We’re not done yet. We won’t stop fighting until animal experiments are a thing of the past. Take action for animals in laboratories in 2025:

  • Every day, dogs, rats and other animals still suffer in painful experiments due to a flawed drug approval process. Tell the U.S. FDA to stop this ineffective system and its unnecessary cruelty by making it clear to drug companies that animal testing is not required.
  • Countless monkeys will suffer in laboratories and research breeding facilities if the U.S. Senate’s new bill to fund the National Institutes of Health goes through! Contact your federal legislators and tell them to fund technologically advanced non-animal methods—NOT monkey experiments.
  • Thousands of mice, rats and pigs could suffer through painful and unnecessary procedures to test sunscreen ingredients if the U.S. FDA goes through with a new plan. Tell the agency to reconsider.

Together we can achieve a future in which no animals must suffer in the name of science.

Sara Amundson is president of Humane Society Legislative Fund.

Federal Legislation Animals in Research