Millions of animals each year are killed in U.S. laboratories as part of medical training and chemical, food, drug and cosmetic testing, according to the non-profit animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
For many animals held captive for research, including a huge range of species from dogs, cats and hamsters to elephants, dolphins and many other species, pain is “not minimized,” U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows.
The issue of animal testing is something most Americans agree on: it needs to change and gradually be stopped.
A Morning Consult poll conducted at the end of last year found that 80 percent of the 2,205 participants either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “The US government should commit to a plan to phase out experiments on animals.”
Since President Donald Trump began his second term, his administration has been making moves to transform and reduce animal testing in country, although the question remains as to whether it will be enough to spare many more animals from pain and suffering this year.
Photo-illustration by Newsweek/Getty/Canva
What Is The Trump Administration Doing About It?
There have been various steps taken in different federal agencies to tackle the issue of animal testing since Trump was sworn in on January 20.
In April, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it was “taking a groundbreaking step to advance public health by replacing animal testing in the development of monoclonal antibody therapies and other drugs with more effective, human-relevant methods.”
The FDA said that its animal testing requirement will be “reduced, refined, or potentially replaced” with a range of approaches, including artificial intelligence-based models, known as New Approach Methodologies or NAMs data.
A Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official told Newsweek: “The agency is paving the way for faster, safer, and more cost-effective treatments for American patients.
“As we restore the agency’s commitment to gold-standard science and integrity, this shift will help accelerate cures, lower drug prices, and reaffirm U.S. leadership in ethical, modern science.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it was “adopting a new initiative to expand innovative, human-based science while reducing animal use in research,” in alignment with the FDA’s initiative.
The agency said that while “traditional animal models continue to be vital to advancing scientific knowledge,” new and emerging technologies could act as alternative methods, either alone or in combination with animal models.
The NIH Office of Extramural Research told Newsweek it was “committed to transparently assessing where animal use can be reduced or eliminated by transitioning to [new approach methodologies (NAMs)].”
“Areas where research using animals is currently necessary represent high-priority opportunities for investment in NAMs,” the agency added.
It added that it will “further its efforts to coordinate agency-wide efforts to develop, validate, and scale the use of NAMs across the agency’s biomedical research portfolio and facilitate interagency coordination and regulatory translation for public health protection.”
During Trump’s first term, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signed a directive to “prioritize efforts to reduce animal testing and committed to reducing testing on mammals by 30 percent by 2025 and to eliminate it completely by 2035,” an EPA spokesperson told Newsweek.
Although, the spokesperson added: “the Biden Administration halted progress on these efforts by delaying compliance deadlines.”
As a member of the House, Lee Zeldin, the EPA’s current administrator, co-sponsored various bills during Trump’s first term regarding animal cruelty, covering issues such as phasing out animal-based testing for cosmetic products; ending taxpayer funding for painful experiments on dogs at the Department of Veteran Affairs; empowering federal law enforcement to prosecute animal abuse cases that cross state lines; and others, the spokesperson said.
What The Experts Think Needs To Be Done
The Trump administration’s efforts to tackle the issue of animal testing appear to be a step in the right direction, according to experts who spoke with Newsweek.
“I was pleasantly surprised and quite frankly a bit shocked to read the simultaneous announcements by the NIH and the FDA regarding a new emphasis on the use of alternatives to animals,” Jeffrey Morgan, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown University in Rhode Island, told Newsweek.
Morgan, who is also the director of the Center for Alternatives to Animals in Testing at Brown University, said that both agencies are moving together in the same direction on the issue “sends a unified and very powerful message to the research and biotech communities.”
He added that the announcements showed “a major acknowledgement of the limitations of the use of animals in research and testing.”
“What is especially exciting is that the NIH announcement will encourage the entry of new investigators into the field, further accelerating innovation in alternatives with exciting impacts for both discovery and applied research across all diseases,” he said.
He added that the FDA announcement and its emphasis on a new regulatory science that embraces data from alternatives was “equally exciting.”
“The demands of this new regulatory science will likewise accelerate innovation because it will establish the much-needed regulatory framework for the rigorous evaluation of data from alternatives,” he said.
While the administration’s initiatives to shift research away from animal testing is heading in the right direction, its policies are “overdue,” Dr. Thomas Hartung, a professor in the department of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Maryland, told Newsweek.
“The animal tests for safety were introduced more than 50 years ago. There is no other area of science where we do not adapt to scientific progress,” he said.
Hartung added that animal “testing takes too long and is too expensive to really provide the safety consumers want.” He said that running animal tests for new chemicals can cost millions and take years in some cases.
“Nobody can wait that long, even if they can afford the testing costs,” he said.
Hartung also believes the shifts in the industry to reduce animal testing have been “coming for a while,” as over the last two decades, America’s opposition to animal use in medical research has been increasing.
“The alignment of FDA and NIH really makes the difference now, which I think is evidence of a strong relationship of their leaderships,” he said.
Yet in order to make a real difference, Hartung said clear deadlines are key to show that “this is not just lip service.”
He also said that he thought “the transformative nature of artificial intelligence in this field is not fully acknowledged.”
“We also need an objective framework for change to better science, such as the evidence-based toxicology approach,” he said.
