Scientific medicine has offered us vaccines, antibiotics, anticancer drugs, vitamins, anxiolytics, analgesics, anaesthetics, innovative therapies and surgeries, among many other advances to the health, well-being and safety of humans and other animals. None of these advances would have been possible without the use of laboratory animals. In fact, 83% of Nobel Prizes in Medicine or Physiology awarded (and all since 1984) have rewarded advances made through animal studies.

Animal experimentation raises ethical issues that must be recognized and properly addressed. For that reason, it is a highly regulated and scrutinized activity. Each establishment that raises or uses animals for scientific or educational purposes must have a team of caretakers, technicians and veterinarians to watch over their well-being, and an Animal Welfare Body (AWB) to ensure compliance with all regulations and to promote a culture of care.

SPCAL wishes a happy World Laboratory Animal Day to all its associates, to the Portuguese Network of AWB, and to all those committed to making a better world for humans and animals, through responsible, ethical and relevant animal experimentation.