There’s been a lot of numbers floated about lately as UBC’s animal use has been discussed in the media – Here’s the figures from the CCAC website which documents research animal use throughout all of Canada.
This is taken directly from the CCAC 2009-2010 annual report. They have some figures up on the website if you’re curious. Animal use has basically held steady in Canada for the last 5 years or so at around 2 million assorted creatures.
And I’ll emphasize again, these are the numbers for all of Canada.
EDIT: I realized after publishing that the figure is far too small to be legible. 😛 However, if you follow the link to the annual report, it is found near the end of that document.
2 important points:
a) These are the statistics of CCAC’s members’ reported usage – not all research in Canada comes under the auspices of the CCAC…. Membership is only mandatory for publicly-funded facilities.
b) The stats for individual institutions are not given, so that we end up as before – asking how many animals is UBC using every year, and at what level of invasiveness? The public is paying for it, so they are entitled to a proper audit. ( Dr. Hepburn, V-P of Research at UBC, stated yesterday on CBC Radio One “On the Coast”, that UBC is 2nd largest biomedical facility in Canada, after U of T, and therefore uses more animals than all but U of T.)
That is true.
I just wanted to get some hard numbers out there for people to at least be able to refer to.