Alistair Currie -
Resident Expert on Animal Tests
Alistair Currie recently celebrated 25 years as a vegetarian (and 15 as a vegan), having gone vegetarian on the day he started training as a nurse in 1984. For far too long, he was content to eat his own badly cooked vegetarian food and simply observe the activities of the animal rights movement. Then, in 1994, he attended his first animal protection meeting in his hometown of Edinburgh. Soon after, he became an enthusiastic activist and, thanks to the advice of his new AR friends, a somewhat less bad cook. After 13 years as a registered nurse, he was so inspired by a talk given by a PETA campaigner to his local group that he decided to seek a professional role in the animal rights movement and has never looked back.
Alistair worked on farmed-animal and vivisection campaigns for Uncaged Campaigns, Viva! and the the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection before coming to PETA in 2007. He is now the policy adviser for the organisation. His work focuses on ending animal experimentation and maximising PETA's impact on public policy in the UK and the European Union. His widely varied responsibilities include meeting with Cabinet ministers, mobilising PETA supporters, lobbying politicians, speaking on national television and in numerous public talks and debates (including those held by the prestigious Oxford Union) and conducting detailed technical work on animal testing and the use of alternatives to animal experiments. Staying in touch with his local campaigner roots, he still occasionally dons the odd animal costume for one of PETA's eye-catching photo opportunities!
Alistair lives in London with his wife and enjoys really good vegan food, music and watching infuriating television programmes (
Question Time and
X Factor in particular).
© iStockPhoto.com / shevvers
Inch by inch, progress is being made in ending animal tests. Actually, today it was more mile by mile. After more than a decade of scientific research, negotiations and lobbying by PETA and other animal protection groups, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has announced that it has approved new, non-animal testing methods for skin irritation.
What does that mean? Until recently, chemicals of all kinds were tested for skin irritation using painful tests on rabbits. But now,… Read more.
© iStockPhoto.com / mashabuba
Today, the government has released its annual statistics on animal experiments. These are the dry figures which represent the imprisonment, suffering and deaths of legions of helpless animals in the UK’s 200 or so laboratories. There’s a lot of information in these figures, but none of it can convey the pain of a mouse genetically engineered to grow tumours, the pathetic confusion of a brain-damaged monkey who awakes from anaesthesia to find her arm paralysed or the terror of a pig… Read more.
© iStockPhoto.com / BrandyTaylor
Anyone who’s ever written to the government or their MP about animal experiments is likely to have received a letter back claiming that the UK has the strictest rules on animal experiments in the world. As part of my job, I look at exactly how our “strict rules” are implemented and what they mean for animals – and the picture I get is often rather different.
A year and a half ago, PETA asked the government what action it was taking… Read more.
Those of you who have read the entire policy document produced last week by our new government will have noticed a few animal welfare measures. I’m sure these proposals won’t be all we’ll see on this from the coalition, but they do give us something to think about.
Animal Testing
The first thing to catch my eye was the very welcome news that the government will end the testing of household products on animals. This is something PETA raised in a meeting with the Conservative… Read more.
© iStockPhoto.com / Luoman
While a handful of backward-looking scientists are calling for a return to the days when pupils cut up dead animals, progressive educators know that these deadly exercises are a waste of lives, money and educational opportunities.
Almost all of the more than 40 comparative studies conducted on this topic have concluded that the learning outcomes of students who are taught using non-animal teaching methods such as interactive computer simulations are equivalent or superior to those of their peers who are taught… Read more.
© Don Feare
Because most people love their animal companions and want to do their best for them, it’s easy to forget that animal companions, too, can be the victims of routine, profit-driven cruelty. Buying animals can have terrible consequences for cats and dogs in animal shelters, but that’s not the only problem. There is a lot of money to be made from the “pet” trade, and that means that animals are going to suffer, just as they do in factory farming and other industries that consider… Read more.
One of the great things about working for PETA is being able to bring about swift progress for animals, often through co-ordinated efforts with PETA’s international affiliates. A superb example of this arose very recently when PETA and our affiliates obtained photographs of dogs at an American airport being flown on a German plane to face experiments in a laboratory right here in the UK. More than 50 beagles are shown in the photographs, and the… Read more.
