Protection of animals: European Convention on vertebrates used for experimental purposes

The Commission's amended proposal incorporates six of the seven amendments adopted by Parliament in plenary. Essentially, the Commission has inserted the changes into the recitals to the proposal, which emphasize the need to reduce animal testing. Specifically, these recitals call for the reduced use of primates in experiments, the development of validated alternative methods to reduce animal testing and international cooperation to avoid duplication of identical experiments. Parliament's amendment calling for statistics on the number of animals used in experiments to be reported every two years until the year 2000, and annually after that date, has also been incorporated into the amended proposal in the form of an amendment to the text concerning the Community reservation. The Commission considers that a two-yearly collection of data until the year 2000 will allow Member States time to prepare for annual data collection. �