Recent events at Max Planck Institute, where Professor Logothetis has publicly quit his primate research after a campaign of harassment by animal rights activists, have turned attention to animal experiments in Germany. In order to encourage accurate and factual discourse on Germany research we have decided to provide the facts on the numbers of animals used in research in Germany.
These statistics were originally published in December 2014, and can be found here.
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87% of experiments in Germany were conducted on rodents, primarily mice (73%) and rats (13%). Other commonly used species were fish (7%) and rabbits (3%). Dogs, cats and primates together accounted for less than 0.2% of research animals.
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Since 2000, the total number of animal tests rose by 64% to a total of 2,977,152 in 2013, though this is slightly lower than in 2012. This reflects similar pattern in many other countries with strong biomedical research sectors such as the UK.
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The rise in animal numbers is almost exclusively from a large rise in the number of mice being used in research in Germany. Part of this reflects the versatility of genetically modified mice which have become a mainstay of research over the last decade.
See animal research statistics from other countries here.
How much of the numbers is just breeding of genetically modified animals with non-harmful mutations/transgenes (e.g. reporter lines), rather than for invasive procedures?
Havng problems with the German, but Table 12 suggests 947,000 transgenic animals (900,000 of which are mice). I presume that’s GM and HM.
http://www.bmel.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/Tier/Tierschutz/2013-TierversuchszahlenGesamt.pdf;jsessionid=AAE1A11321479170D9F7DFD7EED77963.2_cid288?__blob=publicationFile
I’ll have a look at the tables and see what I can make of them. Thank you for the link.