MEMBERS of the European Parliament are to vote within weeks on a proposed new law to update decade-old regulations affecting the enormous scale and degree of suffering of laboratory animals. We have a real chance to significantly improve the lives of more than 12 million individual animals subjected to vivisection in Europe annually.

The cruelty involves poisoning, burning, electrocution, mutilation, sensory deprivation, psychological trauma, exposure to weapons testing and, increasingly, genetic manipulation. Often torn from the wild, kept in barren, sterile cages, frequently in isolation, deprived of everything natural to them, these animals may suffer further abuse through rough handling, torment and neglect. There is no workable legal obligation to administer pain relief, anaesthesia or euthanasia. Dogs are frequently "debarked" to prevent vocalisation of their suffering and distress.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals recognises that this new law provides an opening to end some of the most terrible abuses and worst practices inherent in the outdated vivisection industry, and calls upon a concerned public to add its voice for the following reforms.

Specifically, PETA calls for the law to include provisions that will ban the use of all primates, including chimpanzees, in all experiments; ensure complete public disclosure and accountability of all experiments; and make a significant commitment to further develop and implement non-animal alternative tests — supervised by bodies who do not have vested industrial and commercial interests in perpetuating the statistically corrupt and unscientific fraud of vivisection.

Please take action on behalf of animals by contacting your local MEP to urge them to ensure that the law offers animals new and stronger protection. For information on how to contact your MEP, please visit www.PETA.org.uk/EUdirective.

Gail Woolfenden

AnimalWise

Highcroft, Woolavington

(by email)