Section 14: When an Experiment on an Animal Is Lawful

In one line

Section 14 is a single sentence that makes experiments on animals lawful for four purposes and for nothing else.

In exam wording: section 14 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960 provides that nothing contained in the Act shall render unlawful the performance of experiments, including experiments involving operations, on animals for the purpose of advancement by new discovery of physiological knowledge, or of knowledge which will be useful for saving or for prolonging life or alleviating suffering, or for combating any disease, whether of human beings, animals or plants.

Why the section is drafted as an immunity

The Act is a criminal statute. Section 11 makes fifteen kinds of ill-treatment punishable, and a surgical procedure on a conscious animal would be within several of them. Without section 14, medical and veterinary research would be a series of offences.

So Parliament drafted the permission not as a licence but as an immunity: nothing in the Act renders such an experiment unlawful. Read with section 11(3)(d), which excludes from section 11 any matter dealt with in Chapter IV, the effect is that the cruelty provisions do not reach a laboratory at all, and the only control over what happens there is the machinery in sections 15 to 20.

The four purposes, broken down

1. Advancement by new discovery of physiological knowledge. Basic research. The words "new discovery" matter: repeating a known result is not within them.

2. Knowledge which will be useful for saving life.

3. Knowledge which will be useful for prolonging life or alleviating suffering.

4. Combating any disease, whether of human beings, animals or plants.

The fourth purpose covers plant pathology, which is why an agricultural research institution testing a treatment for a crop disease is within the section.

What section 14 does not do

It does not authorise anything. It removes unlawfulness under this Act. Other law is untouched: the Wild Life (Protection) Act 1972 still applies if the animal is a wild animal, and section 12 of that Act requires a permit from the Chief Wild Life Warden for hunting for scientific research.

It does not remove section 3. Section 3 imposes a duty on every person having the care or charge of an animal. Section 11(3)(d) excludes Chapter IV matters from section 11, not from section 3.

It does not cover experiments for any other purpose. Testing a cosmetic is not within any of the four purposes. Testing for the acquisition of manual skill is not either, and section 17(2)(f) says rules shall be designed to secure that, as far as possible, experiments are not performed merely for the purpose of acquiring manual skill.

It attaches no conditions of its own. The conditions are in section 17 and in the rules.