Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Animal welfare

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (18:48): (1286) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Agriculture, and the action that I seek is for her to explain why 3.65 million chickens were used for a single research project in 2022. In the last reporting period Animal Welfare Victoria claimed that over 5 million animals were used for scientific research, teaching and testing. That is an increase in animal use of 196 per cent compared to the previous year. The increase is attributed to a single project in which chickens were sought from a commercial supplier to be used for regulatory product testing for the purposes of improving annual management and production, but no other information is provided except for the fact that 5114 of them were killed in that year.

The report also tells us that when they were no longer deemed useful for scientific experiments labs across Victoria killed 40 primates, 384,942 mice, 22 exotic birds, 139 native birds – 12 of which were taken from the wild – 27 domestic cats, four koalas and 145 macropods. Thousands of animals are killed, but the true overall number is rather unclear. The report celebrates a low per-year euthanasia rate, but animals are not necessarily killed in the same year they are experimented on. Many will spend years involved in further testing, and the reality is that most animals will die rather than being rehomed. This is especially the case for native wild animals.

The report has a category ‘Death as an end point’ and another for ‘Animal unconscious without recovery’. I am no expert, but that sounds a whole lot like death to me. In two of the vaguest categories from the report, labs also experimented on and killed eight non-specified laboratory mammals and 10 native animals in a category called ‘Other’.

Freedom-of-information requests obtained by Animal-Free Science Advocacy in 2022 revealed images of primates confined in a breeding facility in Churchill, near Gippsland. The images were the first look into the suffering of animals in wire cages as they are tested on and bred repeatedly for upwards of 23 years. These are the details left out of Animal Welfare Victoria’s report.

The public deserves to know what is going on in labs. They deserve to know what kinds of animals are being tested on for their perceived benefit, and they deserve to know where those animals end up if they are not killed in the end. I hope the minister will start the process of greater transparency by first clarifying how and why a project involving nearly 4 million chickens took place in 2022.