Prosecutors in the German state of Hesse are investigating whether the culling of excess research animals by local universities and other institutions constitutes a crime.
In many countries animal rights groups decry the many thousands, even millions, of animals used in medical experiments. In Germany, activists have adopted a new tack: focusing on the even larger number of animals that never make it into an experiment—perhaps because they don’t meet the criteria for a study or were created in the course of breeding a new research strain—and are killed to save space and money.
Two years ago, the European Union estimated that in 2017, when EU labs used 9.4 million animals in experiments, 12.6 million lab-reared animals, about 83% mice and 7% zebrafish, were culled without any studies of them. About one-third of those excess research animals had been bred and killed in Germany, the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture has estimated.
Institutions can’t reasonably house that many animals for so long, according to Lengeling. He says authorities accepted the cullings, typically performed with carbon dioxide for mice, at least until the animal rights groups made it an issue. The criminal complaints “caught everyone including the legislature, which didn’t intend it that way for laboratory animals, off guard,” Tuckermann says.
Better matching the supply of research animals to the demand could also reduce cullings. CRISPR or other gene editors can be used to create modified animals in a single generation, without breeding several generations of surplus animals. And labs can substantially reduce the number of animals killed by thawing frozen sperm or embryos as needed, for example, rather than creating populations of surplus animals to keep modified lines going.
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