A request to our multilingual readers

To our multilingual readers (or our monolingual readers’ multilingual friends), we need your help. We have been trying to build up a picture of animal research worldwide, however our efforts are limited due to language barriers in some countries. So far we have statistics for 13 countries and the EU, copied below. We are looking for people in other countries (or who speak the language) to help us get the animal research statistics for 2014 (or failing that, 2013).

Different countries have their own reporting requirements. All EU countries must now collate and report their animal research data in the same way (though some countries are slower than others at publishing these). On the other hand, countries like Australia do not collate them centrally, instead leaving this to individual territories – some of which collate these statistics, some of which do not.

In order to report on a country, we (at minimum) need the number of each species, or the number of procedures on each species, used in research in a given year. However, additional information on types of research, severity, previous years, etc., all help build up a picture of research in the country. It is also helpful if you can give us an English translation of the headings in any table that you send us. Information should be sent to contact@speakingofresearch.com

Some information may be easily found online – it is just a case of finding the correct webpage of the correct Government department (e.g. here or here or here). Other Governments have FOI laws which can be invoked by emailing the relevant department and requesting the figures. An example email might read:

To whom it may concern,

I would like to know how many animals were used in research in <country> in 2013 and 2014. Please could you provide these figures, or provide a webpage, with these statistics broken down by species.

Yours faithfully

Here is the list of countries where we currently have statistics. We are also interested in getting more recent statistics where they exist.

Full information, including explanations for certain elements of the table, can be found here. 

Thank you to all our readers for your support.

Speaking of Research