Jenny Seagrove – a legendary TV, film and stage actor – is far from happy after hearing about the Home Office's annual figures for animal testing. The Judge John Deed star knows that 92 per cent of drugs that pass animal tests fail in humans because animals and people are physiologically different – except when it comes to feeling fear and pain.
In her exclusive interview with PETA, Jenny said that the rise in animal testing "is the most depressing stat of all. Having dropped through the '90s, vivisection is now on the increase. Will the scientific community never learn that what is tested on an animal will not necessarily work or be safe for a human?"
Jenny has always had a strong passion for defending animals. She is a dedicated vegetarian and has spoken out against experiments on animals for many years. Even her character on Judge John Deed, barrister Jo Mills, takes the moral high ground and supports a defendant's refusal of a heart transplant because experiments were performed on animals in the process of developing the transplant technique.
"I don't believe there is a place for vivisection in our modern society for several reasons", says Jenny. "[Animal experimentation] is unreliable – animals react differently [than we do]. The pain and suffering caused to animals is just too awful to consider, and there are so many other ways of testing drugs - that using sentient beings is totally unnecessary."
An animal dies in an EU laboratory every three seconds. Animals in laboratories are shocked, infected, burned, poisoned and surgically mutilated in experiments which cannot reliably predict human responses. Experiments on animals in the UK were reduced by half between the 1970s and 1997, but since 2000, the number of experiments performed on animals every year has been increasing – hitting a 17 year high in the latest figures with over 3.1 million animals used. Last year, PETA released an exclusive public opinion poll conducted by YouGov which showed that 80 per cent of the British public is in favour of some form of ban on experiments which cause suffering to animals.
Please use the form below to let Home Secretary Jacqui Smith know that testing on animals is unacceptable, and demand an end to such unreliable, cruel practices on sentient beings.
