Animal testing in New Zealand
Wiki New Zealand, which has information on all sorts of things, has a graph showing animal use for research/testing/teaching in NZ over time. The data are from the annual report (PDF) of the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee.
Here’s a slightly more detailed graph showing types of animals and who used them, over time.
It’s also important to remember that nearly all the livestock and domestic animals weren’t harmed significantly — research on things like different feed or stocking densities still counts. Most of the rodents and rabbits ended up dead, as did about a third of the fish.
The two big increases recently are commercial livestock (most of which are no worse off than they would be anyway as livestock) and fish at universities. The increase in fish is probably due at least in part to substitution of zebrafish for mice in some biological research.
No, I don’t know what the government departments did with 40000 birds in 2009. [Update: thanks to James Green in comments, I now do. I]
[Update: here’s the data in accessible form]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Fush
10 years ago
(Grin)
10 years ago
“Fush”. Ha ha, very funny… Novel…
10 years ago
Out of curiosity, how did you produce the data in accessible form?
Did you scrape it off the pdf itself, or ask nicely for the data?
10 years ago
I used Acrobat Pro to save the PDF table as Excel, copied and pasted it into the R.app editor, then removed all the spaces in numbers over 999 by hand. Apart from the last step it wasn’t too bad.
10 years ago
re: 40000 birds in 2009. I was going to guess something to do with bird flu. And I’m right!
“”However, the influence a single project can have on the annual statistics is demonstrated this year by the reporting of a study involving the use of chicken eggs to investigate and monitor exotic avian influenza and other pathogens in wild bird species.”
10 years ago