The European Coalition to End Animal Experiments (ECEAE), of which One Voice is a member, has revealed that hundreds of thousands of mice are killed in Botox tests with great cruelty despite the existence of non-animal tests. On 9 July, the ECEAE organised a European Action Day and is demanding the responsible authority, the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and Healthcare (EDQM), to abolish this regulatory testing.

On 23 June 2022, hundreds of long-tailed macaques were filmed by PETA in the process of being unloaded from an Egyptair cargo plane which had just landed at JFK Airport in the United States.

One Voice and its partners are getting Air France to stop transporting primates for animal testing!

One Voice and its partners are getting Air France to stop transporting primates for animal testing!
30.06.2022
One Voice and its partners are getting Air France to stop transporting primates for animal testing!
Animal testing

It is official: today, Thursday 30 June 2022, Air France has just publicly announced it on Twitter under a post supporting our campaign: “Air France has decided to stop transporting primates”.

Bonjour, en cohérence avec sa stratégie RSE, Air France a décidé d’arrêter le transport de primates. Elle y mettra fin dès l’issue de ses engagements contractuels en cours avec les organismes de recherche.

— Air France Newsroom (@AFnewsroom) June 30, 2022

After years of relentless struggles, One Voice have got Air France to stop primate transportation. It is a huge victory that we share with our British partners, Action For Primates, and Spanish one, Stop Camarles, but also with members of the European coalitions that we are part of, the European Coalition to End Animal Experiments (ECEAE) and Cruelty Free Europe, and who, for many among us, have taken on the fight that has stopped the transport of monkeys from and to foreign countries into France.

Muriel Arnal, President of One Voice, stated:

“France is one of the rare countries in Europe which continues to experiment on primates, experiments in which the suffering inflicted on our cousins is generally severe. Since 1996 (One Voice was called Aequalis at the time), we have requested that Air France stops taking part in this torture inflicted on primates. We are extremely happy about this decision, even if it comes late in relation to what is at stake and in relation to other companies.”

Air France was one of the last large national companies to continue taking part in the cruel trade of animals for laboratories, and monkeys in particular, coming mainly from the Republic of Mauritius
where they are violently captured in the wild and destined for breeding (at Biosphere Trading for example) and many among them are sent abroad, turning France into a hub for this trade that is certainly legal, but despicable. European parliamentarians have thus themselves also taken part in our fight for the Mauritian macaques destined to die on laboratory benches.

This decision is in part due to collecting a million signatures under the framework of the European Citizens’ Initiative in favour of stopping testing on animals for cosmetics, and a unanimous vote by Members of the European Parliament for a progressive elimination of animal testing in the EU in September 2021, as well as the effective implementation at the end of the year for the ban on using F1 primates (from the first generation born in captivity from parents captured in the wild), and many other national and freight
companies having stopped these activities.

We spare a thought for the macaques in Indonesia, Cambodia, and Mauritius, passing through the Silabe
platform (in collaboration with the University of Strasbourg), and for those still being transported by other companies (Wamos Air or EgyptAir, Air Bridge Cargo…), but also via Russia or the United States, against which our work to raise awareness will continue tirelessly.

Of course, we are going to contact Air France as soon as possible in order to learn more on the terms of this cessation, because the publication mentions that it will not be effective immediately but at the end of the contracts in place with research laboratories.

We are counting on you to continue to sign the petition to put a stop to transporting monkeys from Mauritius. And you can always add your voice to the European Citizens’ Initiative SaveCrueltyFreeCosmetics, which, as you may know, does not have a direct link with primates, but also calls for an eventual stop to testing on all animals within the European Union.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice

Forced swimming: footage

Forced swimming: footage
17.06.2022
Forced swimming: footage
Animal testing

We talked about it in our previous post : the Ministry of Research has just approved a project that involves inflicting electric shocks and forced swimming on rodents. It is difficult to imagine the fear felt by these animals as they float in a bowl where they do not know if they can ever get out. The footage of their attempts to escape speaks volumes, however.

In 2015, the University of Alaska Fairbanks put videos online of lessons to teach students to correctly decipher the behaviours of rodents subjected to forced swimming tests. The professor described, in a completely detached way (or with an occasional smile), the mice’s attempts to get out of the container or to stay alive by floating.

Forced to swim and held up by their tails

In the second video, the mouse appears terrorised from the beginning, floating and defecating before starting to move, which the professor finds very interesting. He does not reveal that defecation is a long-known stress marker among mice – and does not do it more in the fourth video, faced with a mouse that alternates between floating and desperate attempts to escape from the container.

At the end of the last two videos, we see the professor’s hand retrieve the mice in the container by grabbing them by the tail – again, a practice known to generate stress for mice as well as rats.

The footage cannot show, and we cannot imagine, the terror felt by these mice when they are immersed in this container with no possibility of getting out. How can you not show minimal empathy watching four mice adopting four different strategies, four different reactions faced with this situation? These are in fact four individuals who very much want to get out of this container without knowing that they are entirely subject to the good will of the researcher.

This is happening in France

These practices do not disappear at the French border. Don’t forget about our previous blog, which talked about the authorisation of a new project of this kind this year by the Ministry of Research.

Between 2019 and 2022, we have found many publications from French teams having controlled the effects of molecules or genetic modifications specifically by using the forced swimming test*. Three cases deserve particular attention:

• instead of one six-minute session, the Universities of Toulouse and Lyon 1 subjected the mice to a forced swim of ten minutes a day for five days in a row, with the idea of making it a better model for testing a medication;
• elsewhere, the NutriNeuro team (INRAE/ Bordeaux University) worked with Activ’Inside (a company from the Bordeaux region that produces ingredients for sellers of ‘natural’ dietary supplements) for testing the effect of one of their ingredients (saffron) on depressive behaviours — showing that ‘natural’ health cannot mean that cruelty is not involved.
• in a video article published at the end of 2021 and nicely entitled ‘The chronic despair model’, Strasbourg and Fribourg Universities showed procedures carried out over the last few years — the first two minutes of the video, available for free, show a part of what the rodents are subjected to in this context.

Animal Models of Depression – Chronic Despair Model (CDM)

 

Help us to put a stop to these tests

Rodents are incredible animals, they laugh, they play, they feel emotions as complex as regret and have an interest in their own lives. It is unacceptable that these tests carry on nowadays. We have no right to make these animals suffer for our own interests.

So that we can fight for the abolition of animal testing, we need to take care of our health. Everyone is likely to need medication at some point. Now, all branded drugs involve research using animals to develop them and require testing on animals to put them on the market. While waiting for a ban on animal testing, we therefore recommend, where possible, buying generic drugs, that can be put on the market without involving animal testing – which at least makes it a symbolic choice.

Over the next few weeks, we will tell you more about the international campaigns against the use of forced swimming and the alternatives worth considering to help people suffering with depression.

Join us in asking the Ministry of Research to forbid these tests.

• Standard letter (download here) to be sent via the ministry form
• By sending tweets to the ministry according to the models below:

Copy this posts on Twitter: Stop electric shocks and forced swimming for animals! Public authorities should not authorise such cruel experiments! @sup_recherche
https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: .@sup_recherche, France must commit, like laboratories abroad, to put an end to cruel forced swimming tests on mice and rats!
https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: Making rats depressed with electric shocks will not give more effective treatments! #EndAnimalTesting, @sup_recherche !
https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: Instead of torturing rats to produce yet more medications, train psychologists and psychiatrists with 21st century tools! @sup_recherche https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #StopForcedSwimming #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale

Copy this posts on Twitter: Stop electric shocks and forced swimming! More funding for in vitro methods! @sup_recherche https://one-voice.fr/en/news/electric-shocks-and-forced-swimming-in-france-in-2022/ #StopNageForcée #EndAnimalTesting @onevoiceanimal #ExpérimentationAnimale #StopForcedSwimming

This article is the second in a series of five on forced swimming:

1. Electric shocks and forced swimming in France in 2022
2. Forced swimming: the images
3. Forced swimming: the companies that advance and the industry that resists
   
4. Forced swimming: other approaches are possible
5. Forced swimming: a long-term battle (to come)

* The recent publications are signed by teams from Neurolixis & Pierre Fabre, from the Institute of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of Paris (Inserm U12266), from the Paris-Saclay University, from a coalition between the university hospital and universities supported by the French National Research Agency, from the Charles Gerhardt Institute and from Montpellier University, from the Neurocentre Magendie at Bordeaux University, from the Institute of Biology Paris-Seine, from the Côte d’Azur University, and many others.

Translated from the French by Joely Justice