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Modern vaccines protect cats and dogs from painful and deadly diseases like parvovirus, enteritis and distemper. These vaccines are manufactured in laboratories using products of non-animal origin or, in some cases, tissue cultures.
Before these vaccines can be injected into your pet they must first be tested, to make sure they are effective and safe. This is a legal requirement.
At present, this involves vaccinating a cat or dog with a sample from each batch of vaccine and then testing its blood to see if the vaccine has worked.
This one test is enough to "prove" a whole batch of vaccine. It means that 50,000 loved pets are assured of protection from agonising death from disease.
Several manufacturers are now developing vaccine batch tests which don't involve animals. However, a specific test has to be developed for each vaccine, so progress is slow.
In the future, there will be virtually no need to use animals for routine batch testing in the animal vaccine industry.
Research using dogs and other animals in the 1930s led to the discovery of insulin and the treatment of diabetes. More recently, research on dogs has led to the development of heart pacemakers, open-heart surgery and organ (including kidney) transplants.