This photo made me stop everything I was doing and just stare. I’ve seen a lot of nasty images in my time, but this photo of the caged (or almost ‘bagged’ monkeys) for use in laboratories really made me sad.

The photographer Li Feng called the photo ‘Caged monkeys await their fate at a medical laboratory in Hubei Province, China’ and won in the Animal-International category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

Well if this doesn’t mobilise people into action against animal experimentation…

Find out what you can do to help animals confined to cages for medical and cosmetics testing here.

Image: FeedRaider / Creative Commons

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has announced that they will stop using live goats in decompression sickness tests for the Navy. It is a great victory and one long awaited – this has been going on for over 50 years, with more than 400 experiments carried out since the year 2000.

The sickening deep-diving tests were to see if in an emergency it would be safer for submarine crew to abandon ship or wait for rescue. And what did the goats have to go through for this? Apparently, decompression sickness causes ‘excruciating’ pain with other symptoms such as vomiting, confusion, memory loss, nausea and vertigo.

But the battle is not over and the MoD continues to experiment on rats, mice and monkeys, including trying to infect monkeys with anthrax and other cruel tests.

It stands to reason that these tests have been going on for so long and it’s clear that animal tests are a waste of time, money and precious lives. What the MoD didn’t find out in ten years in these goat tests they weren’t going to find out in 50, and the same goes for all animal experimentation.