Labelling Animal Research?

Imagine a future scenario where everyday medicines had a label to denote the role of animal research in their production. What could this label look like? And if we had such a label, what would be the societal consequences? Can these questions contribute to new and fruitful discussions about animal research?

Welcome to the website for the lab-animal-labels discussion tool. This creative tool was launched as part of ESRC Festival of Social Sciences 2020. It is based on research carried out as part of the Animal Research Nexus Programme funded by the Wellcome Trust. This programme ran from 2017-2023.

The aim of this website is to provide information about a discussion prompt we have to developed, and to seek feedback on possible future uses. The tool was designed as a creative way of encouraging discussion about the topic of animal research and has been used successfully with several groups involving diverse participants, in the UK and beyond.  

The topic of animal research can sometimes seem abstract or distant from our everyday lives. The topic can also sometimes appear to be a matter only for specific ‘experts’, such as laboratory animal scientists, philosophers or regulators. In addition, animal research can sometimes be presented as an issue that someone is either ‘for’ or ‘against’. Our guiding principle was to try and avoid these common assumptions and develop an activity designed to connect with everyday life, one which recognises we all wear multiple ‘hats’ in relation to medicine and animals, and accepts that the issue is inevitably highly complex.

Instead of asking what people ‘think’ of animal research, we therefore decided to start with a very different kind of question or provocation, asking ‘if every-day medicines were labelled to indicate they had been tested on animals, what might this look like?’. This was partly inspired by the suggestion, reported in the media, that labelling medicines as such may change the way that individuals view this topic.  

Please visit our About page for more information about the background research, evolution of the project, and the process we have used so far.

Please see the Labels page for examples of the labels produced by participants.