Animal testing for vet vaccines is down - but don't call it the end of animal testing
New government figures show fewer animals used to check vet vaccine batches than a decade ago - though a third of vaccines still need animal testing before they reach the shelf.
The claim
The Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD), the government body that regulates animal medicines, says the average number of animals needed to quality-check a single batch of veterinary vaccine has dropped by 41% since 2013 - from 29 animals per batch down to 17 in 2024. Overall animal use in this part of the process fell 29% over the same period, even as more vaccines were being released onto the market. That’s the headline, and it comes straight from the regulator’s own report, not from a manufacturer trying to burnish its welfare credentials.
What’s actually being measured
It’s worth being precise about what “quality control” covers here, because it’s easy to read this as “vaccine testing on animals is disappearing.” It isn’t - not entirely, and not yet. These figures relate specifically to batch release testing: the checks done on each finished batch of an already-approved vaccine before it can be sold, to confirm it’s safe and works as intended. That’s a narrower slice of the animal-testing picture than the earlier research and development stage, where new vaccines are still trialled before authorisation.
Within that narrower slice, the progress looks genuinely substantial. The VMD credits the removal of the routine Target Animal Batch Safety Test in 2013 as the single biggest driver, saying it cut animal numbers by thousands a year almost overnight. Since then, horses, cats, dogs, turkeys and pigeons have reportedly dropped out of routine batch testing altogether, replaced by laboratory-based alternatives that don’t require a live animal.
The bit that shouldn’t get lost
The more telling number, arguably, is this one: in 2013, 74% of veterinary vaccines released in the UK needed some form of animal testing as part of quality control. By 2024, that had fallen to 34%. That’s real progress - but it also means a third of vaccines on the market still rely on animal-based checks. This is a decline, not an elimination, and the government’s own framing - “reduce and ultimately replace” - makes clear that replacement is the long-term goal, not the current reality.
Who this actually affects
Farmers, vets and pet owners aren’t going to notice anything different day-to-day - vaccines will still turn up, still work, and still go through the same regulatory approval process as before. This is a behind-the-scenes shift in how batches are verified before they leave the factory, driven by scientific advances that let labs replace live-animal checks with alternative assays. Nobody buying a flu jab for their dog or a vaccine for a herd of cattle is being asked to do anything differently.
The people this is genuinely relevant to are those who track animal use in science and industry - researchers, welfare campaigners and policymakers monitoring the UK’s stated commitment to phase down animal testing. For them, this is a useful, checkable data point rather than a symbolic gesture.
The bottom line
The numbers are real, government-published and specific, and the direction of travel is clearly downward. But this is progress within one part of the vaccine pipeline, not proof that animal testing in veterinary medicine is ending. A third of vaccines still need it. Worth noting as steady, incremental change - not a breakthrough.