Week 8 - European Union urged to review animal testing

There are over 11 million animals that are killed annually in the European Union because of animal testing. I tried to research the amount of animals killed in the US because of research purposes but I wasn't successful. It turns out that because there are so many animals in laboratories and records are not kept for all of these animals being used, estimates of the number of animals tortured and killed in US laboratories very widely. If it is 11 million in the EU, however, imagine how much it is in the US! Nonetheless the number of animals killed in the EU was surprising to me and really led me think about how necessary the use of animals is for research.Either way I applaud Jane Goodall, the world expert on primates, for urging the EU to look at alternatives for animal testing. The full story can be found here. While the EU is already leading the US on it's policy towards curbing animal cruelty, Goodall has pushed the EU to adopt more stringent policies towards eradicating animal testing. Among her suggestions Goodall suggested that Nobel Peace prizes for scientific breakthroughs be given to experiments that avoided using animal testing. Furthermore Goodall pushed for more work to be done on "new ways of testing and experimenting that will not involve the use of live, sentient beings."