NEWS AND OPINION: I can say with confidence and without any possibility of defamation that an animal testing laboratory in or near Hamburg, Germany called Laboratory of Pharmacology and Toxicology (LPT) was found to be treating animals barbarically and they were kept in appalling conditions. I apologise for this story but I have duty to report in the interests of animal welfare.
We don’t know the details of how a video of the operation got out into the public domain but it did. I won’t reproduce the video here nor the still images bar one because they are horrible. However, the public must be aware of abuse of these animals. The behavior of the individuals responsible is nothing short of scandalous as mentioned and LPT have resigned their membership of the European Animal Research Association just before they were expelled (to avoid the expulsion). Clearly, they would have been expelled for being in breach of the membership rules of the EARA. The membership was terminated because the secret filming revealed “unacceptable standards of animal welfare”.
The images show monkeys screaming in agony and cats and dogs left to bleed on the floor and die in their own filth following toxicity tests. According to Cruelty Free International, 49 cats and 80 dogs were saved from the facility last year. They were transferred to animal welfare organisations or fostered privately before adoption. A police investigation was conducted last year and the laboratory was given two weeks to hand over all the animals to third-party rescues.
I will presume that the facility was shut down but a further hearing, perhaps an appeal to a higher court, resulted in the laboratory reopening while parallel criminal proceedings are being conducted against, I presume, some of the personnel at the facility. I have two make some presumptions because the reporting is skimpy in respect of this background information.
I’m also told that a petition to close the laboratory has collected 1.2 million signatures but I couldn’t find it. Suffice to say that there is uproar about the behaviour of this laboratory, there have been protests and animal advocates in distress begging that the laboratory be shut down and that the torturing of these animals stops.
The business has been described as a sort of madness in which profit overrides animal welfare. It is also argued that their tests on animals lack usefulness in the transference of the results to humans. This is because tests on animals don’t readily transfer to projected results on humans.
Hamburg’s Justice and Consumer Protection Senator Anna Gallina of the Green party said that she wants to work more for animal welfare at a federal level and that there is an urgent need to protect laboratory animals.
As I understand it LPT have been forced to change their apparent practices. I don’t know whether this is the case and whether it has happened. LPT’s “About Us” page contains no information at all. Perhaps it has been removed due to this scandal which has blown up in their faces.
