Last Monday, the responsible committee at the Federal Chancellery submitted the initiative "Yes to a future free of animal testing." It is already the fifth successful popular initiative since 1981 that demands a ban on animal testing. Not even three years ago, the last initiative with the same demand clearly failed with 79 percent No votes.
The committee is the same as in the last vote, but the draft text is different. In contrast to the old version, the new edition no longer demands a ban on the import of products that have been tested on animals. This would have included all medications approved for the market. The ban on "human trials," which would have made clinical studies with volunteers impossible, has also disappeared. Thus, two crucial weaknesses of the last initiative have been eliminated. But not all.
Surveys showed that the most compelling argument against the 2022 initiative was: If accepted, research would move abroad. The new initiative also has no answer to this, whose only demand is a ban on all animal testing.
Even a hopeless initiative can launch a debate. But does this initiative launch the right one?
To the author
Nico Müller studied philosophy and sociology and earned a doctorate at the University of Basel with a dissertation on animal ethics. He is currently leading a project within the National Research Program 79, which is funded by the Swiss National Fund. In his work, he deals with ethical and conceptual aspects of planning the exit from animal testing.
Time jump: In 1836, a dog escapes from a laboratory at the University of Bern. It was supposed to be part of a study on how much blood the body needs. Thereafter, newspapers label the responsible study director, Professor Gabriel Gustav Valentin, as a "dog torturer."
The episode is the starting signal for a nearly 200-year controversy over animal testing in Switzerland.
In 1876, another researcher, the German professor Moritz Schiff, accepted a position at the University of Geneva. He is known for studies in which he brings animals to cardiac arrest with chloroform and massages their hearts in the opened chest until they beat again. The British animal welfare pioneer Frances Power Cobbe had already conducted campaigns against him at Schiff's previous workplace in Florence and follows him to Switzerland. The disputes intensify.
Due to these tensions, the Confederation consulted in 1877 with the universities of Basel, Bern, Zurich, and Geneva about whether they could forgo animal testing. They said no. Four years later, the first petition for a ban reaches the Federal Council – without any response. And at the cantonal level, several initiatives between the 1890s and the 1930s demand a ban on animal testing. All fail at the ballot box.
Only much later, namely in 1981, does the first national animal protection law come into force. It makes animal testing in Switzerland subject to approval, but does not prohibit it. Even in the same year a popular initiative for a ban is submitted. It fails at the ballot box, just like its successors 1992, 1993 and 2022.
The debate about a ban on animal testing is by no means new. On the contrary: Few issues have been so controversially discussed in this country for so long. And politically so hopeless.
Number of animal experiments is rising again
While the debate remained in place, practice changed. In 1983, the federal government first raised the number of animals used in experiments. It came to around 2 million. However, by the mid-1990s, the number fell rapidly, to 550,000 to 750,000 per year. The reasons for this are not completely clarified. However, it is clear that worldwide, fewer and fewer animals were used for experiments. Especially in the industry, which was increasingly able to replace animal testing with simpler and cheaper methods.
But since 2020 the number is rising slightly again. Last year, nearly 600,000 laboratory animals were registered.
What adds to this: For every animal used in an experiment, there is now one that is bred for it but not used. The reason: Not all siblings in a litter have the desired traits in breeding. These animals are usually killed. Last year, about 1 million laboratory animals were bred in Switzerland and around 210,000 were imported.
I want to know more precisely: What does "animal testing" even mean?
«Animal testing» is a collective term. According to Law, this includes any use of living animals to test scientific hypotheses. The spectrum is enormous. Experiments can be completely harmless to animals, for example when dogs voluntarily have to solve a small task in studies. However, the experiments can also have severe consequences, such as when mice are bred with brain tumors.
The approval system distinguishes four so-called severity levels from zero ("no burden") to three ("severe burden"). About 5 percent of the experimental animals used last year were subjected to the highest burden, 28 percent each to the two middle levels, and 39 percent to severity level zero. However, it should be noted that death is not legally considered a "burden." And most animal experiments, including painless ones, end with death, as only a vanishingly small proportion of experimental animals are transferred to animal shelters.
Among the animals used, according to the latest Federal Statistics, about 60 percent are mice. They are mainly used for research on cancer and neurological diseases. The rest are predominantly rats, fish, and birds, of which a large part are chickens in feeding studies. Universities and hospitals use more than half of all animals. And in a majority of cases, it is about basic research, not direct applications such as new active substances.
That the number of animal experiments in Switzerland has been rising again for a few years is a problem for the state. After all, each burdensome animal experiment represents a conflict: According to the Federal Constitution, the public sector must support both animal protection and research promotion. However, when making decisions about animal experiments, it must prioritize one of these goods over the other.
The state assists itself with a balancing system: If a researcher wants to conduct an animal experiment, she must submit an application to the cantonal veterinary authority and outline the harm to the animals and the potential benefits of the study. And she must explain to what extent the animal experiment is suitable and indispensable for her research question.
The responsible veterinary office then weighs: Does the study bring more benefit or more harm? In the case of severity level zero, it decides itself. In the case of higher severity levels, it involves an animal testing commission. This is predominantly made up of researchers, but also includes representatives from animal welfare organizations. However, the cantonal offices almost always come to the same conclusion: They reject less than 1 percent of the applications.
What is the alternative?
In the midst of routine, one could almost forget that this weighing of goods is actually a crisis instrument: having to weigh one constitutional good against another countless times a year is not a satisfactory state.
Therefore, the question arises: Are we doing enough to avoid the conflict between animal welfare and research from the outset?
The federal government has been investing public funds since the 1980s in programs for the so-called "3 R": replace, reduce, refine. Researchers are therefore expected to replace, reduce, and refine animal testing as much as possible.
This is quite possible: Some animal experiments can be replaced, for example, by studies with cell cultures or computer simulations. Or: Researchers can make precise statistical calculations to manage with fewer animals. Or: They can handle animals more gently. For example, zebrafish are less stressed when there is some seagrass and gravel in their tank, and mice prefer to be transported in a glass tube rather than on a human hand.
These measures certainly have a certain positive effect. However, it is quite obvious that the federal "3 R" programs alone are not sufficient to sustainably reduce the number of animal experiments in Switzerland.
This is not surprising. After all, researchers are not only developing new alternative methods but also continuously new animal experiments. For example, if they discover new genetic similarities between animals and humans – such as between genetic variations in primates and humans with rare diseases – they can also develop new experiments on animals that may allow conclusions to be drawn about humans. Or researchers manipulate the genome of test animals so that they exhibit the desired traits. So it is at best a half-solution to replace the already existing animal experiments with alternatives.
The foreign country is further
What else could one do? A look across the national border helps.
The German federal government, for example, is currently developing a reduction strategy for animal testing. Details of the plan are not yet public. But just the step of formulating a strategy is a paradigm shift. When one knows which steps to take to reach the goal, progress is firstly more likely and secondly better assessable.
The European Parliament also advocated for a comprehensive Exit Strategy from animal testing in 2021.
There are many building blocks for such a strategy, for example in research funding: A public foundation in the Netherlands awards a bonus of 50,000 euros for biomedical projects if they can be conducted without animal testing. This is an incentive for researchers to seek progress especially where it can be achieved without animal testing. There is also a center in the Netherlands for so-called "Helpathons". These are workshops where researchers collaboratively revise their project ideas to manage with fewer or no animal tests.
One can also create structures that particularly promote certain animal testing-free approaches. Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain each have firmly established programs for the development of organs on a chip. In this technology, human cells are connected on plastic plates through tiny chambers and channels, allowing them to replicate bodily processes in miniature. For example, parts of the liver can be modeled in this way and tested accordingly to see how a chemical substance affects the tissue. Switzerland is one of the few countries that, while having good researchers in this field, does not promote them with its own structures.
But measures would also be possible in universities: The University of Utrecht, for example, has had its own chair in "evidence-based transition to animal-free innovations" since 2022.
Switzerland needs an animal testing strategy
Such measures are not aimed at banning animal testing. Instead, they create an environment in which animal testing-free top research thrives so well that animal testing is no longer the most interesting option.
An animal testing strategy could be implemented differently in Switzerland. Already, the Federal Council provides research policy impulses every four years in the so-called BFI Message – short for Education, Research, Innovation. The topic of animal testing, let alone concrete goals for promoting animal testing-free approaches, is not yet included. The Federal Council could change that.
A corresponding strategy could also be anchored in the Animal Protection Act, which is due for revision anyway. Parliament could, for example, require the Federal Council to regularly set goals for how Switzerland should further develop in terms of animal testing. In this direction aims a parliamentary initiative by the green councilor Maya Graf.
But the National Fund, as the largest research promoter, would also have to take action. Like its Dutch counterpart, it could set targeted incentives for animal testing-free projects.
In short: In animal testing, we should discuss how to change things, not the same old pros and cons that have been around for over 150 years. What concrete measures should the federal government and cantons, as well as national funds and universities, take to promote alternatives to animal testing and reduce animal experiments? How should they coordinate? And who should pay for it? These are the crucial questions.
Another initiative for a mere ban on animal testing will hardly launch this discussion. We still have to lead it.