A suspension of authorizations for six months: Aptuit, the multinational pharmaceutical experimentation company based in Verona, will not be able to continue with atrocious experiments on the 2000 Beagle dogs currently used until the ruling of the TAR on December 16th.
This is the decision of the TAR of Lazio which accepted LAV’s request, which thus beat the Ministry of Health and the Superior Council of Health for this first round for which evidently everything was in compliance.
The TAR, in the sentence, declares that “there appear to be serious illegitimacies committed within the animal facility in relation to the method of detention of the dogs as well as in relation to the qualification of the pain, the classification of the procedures and the practice of reuse; – that article 9 of the Constitution and article 13 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union require that animal welfare be ensured”.
“A goal never achieved before against vivisection in Italy. A
exceptional result which saw LAV its experts and its lawyers working for years, in order to reveal the irregularities of what happens within the walls of Aptuit” declared Valeria Albanese, LAV animal-free research area.
Following what LAV had brought to light with the complaints, which led to an investigation by the Verona Prosecutor’s Office and then into the seizure of animals, LAV had asked for the authorizations to be suspended to definitively stop the experiments on dogs and free the animals again locked up and the TAR accepted this request.
“As always happens when we manage to obtain data relating to vivisection,
what is revealed behind the silence of animal testing goes beyond all imagination: the animals in the laboratories suffer before, after and during the experiments and further violence is added to these abuses” declared Valeria
Albanese, from the LAV animal-free research area.
Last April 18, LAV broke the news of the largest seizure of animals from an experimental laboratory in Italy, from which 51 beagle dogs, macaques and marmoset monkeys were brought to safety, of which 25 were entrusted to LAV and are finally and definitively safe.
Since 2021, LAV has never stopped paying attention to the activities of the well-known multi-million dollar company Aptuit: thanks to the first report of the arrival of beagle puppies from France and destined for the company which then led to the investigation and finally the seizure of the animals, LAV lawyers presented requests for access to the documents to the Ministry of Health to find out what was happening within those walls and to what experiments the newly arrived beagle puppies would have been subjected.
Thanks to the documentation obtained, LAV discovered that Aptuit conducts extremely invasive experiments and in conditions which, from what we have learned, do not even meet the minimum requirements imposed by law on thousands of dogs: a single authorization involves, for example, the involvement of 1600 dogs, although this species can only be used in exceptional cases and, moreover, leaving them isolated for days and weeks deprived of any socialization and contact.
“The Ministry of Health has denied us the acquisition on several occasions
of the requested documents or has provided them to us only in part, endorsing pretexts of defense of the Company’s right to confidentiality. We did not stop in front of this waste and, in the name of the principle of transparency and LAV’s right to know what
happened in the animal facility, we obtained access to the data after six appeals and six victories at the TAR which always confirmed LAV’s right to know what was happening. It was a work that lasted two years and involved scientific and legal experts who highlighted how the information obtained up to that point showed numerous critical aspects, as also demonstrated by the inspections of the Carabinieri and veterinarians which led the Verona Prosecutor’s Office to decree the seizure of the animals, the opening of investigations against the then president and the veterinarian and the request that the judgment for the crimes of mistreatment and killing of animals be evaluated for them” declared Valeria Albanese, research area without animals of LAV.
