PETA 'misled' public over animal tests - ads watchdog

Published on Wednesday 22 March 2006 00:43

ANTI-VIVISECTION campaigners are deceiving the public about animal testing to raise funds, a pro-research group said, as the Advertising Standards Authority upheld five complaints against the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

The Research Defence Society also published a dossier detailing "15 years of lies, distortions and half-truths attacking the scientific basis of animal research" by animal rights groups.

The ASA ruling covered a UK leaflet which asked people to send donations to PETA and claimed that nearly three million "sensitive animals", such as monkeys, rabbits and mice, were killed every year in Britain in painful experiments and that animal experiments were a "crude and unreliable" method of researching human medicines because animals were "vastly different from humans".

The ASA ruled that "the implication that physiological differences rendered the results of animal experiments crude or inapplicable to humans was misleading".