Circa 11 million animals are still tortured every year for experimental purposes. Within four years, the number of animal experiments in Europe increased by about 12%. In Germany alone, according to official statistics more than 2.4 million animal experiments are performed annually. In 2005, 1.4 million mice, 570,000 rats, 4,892 dogs, 1,023 cats, 2,105 monkeys, 105,293 rabbits, 40,297 guinea pigs, 3,652 sheep, 101,551 fish and creatures of many other species were tortured and killed in Germany alone.

»At night I dream of a cold steel cage and the agonizing cries of pain from my fellow prisoners. I know nothing else. I wake up in the morning. It is like in my dream: a cold steel cage, cries of lament filled with fear and pain come from my fellow prisoners. I know nothing else. Will they come to me again today and inject me with poison – or will they go to my neighbor? Yesterday, they fetched a cat from the cage across the way and bored holes in its head. Then they injected acid into its brain. They haven’t done that to me yet. But they have given me poison several times. I got sick from it. My joints are very swollen and painful. By abdomen is filled with water. I don’t know the name of the poison that I get, but I know that it is slowly killing me.«

»I have not done anything to harm another animal. I lived in a big flock. They came over and over again to fetch some of us. They never returned. One day, they also took me. Where they took me was not a meadow where I could run around. I was only a stall in the cellar of a big house that they locked me into. Yesterday they took me out of the stall. At first I didn’t know at all what was going on and what they planned to do with me. But then they tortured me. They pressed in a side of my lungs and took so much blood from me that my heart almost stopped beating and I lost consciousness. Then they bored a metal rod into my leg. It’s still in there. I’m in pain and am very afraid, because I don’t know what they are still planning to do to me.«

»I was born free. The jungle was my home. I lived there with my family. I had everything that anyone needs for a happy life: a home, food, security, sunlight, the green of the jungle, brothers and sisters and my freedom. One day you came into my world. You killed my parents and captured me and my brothers and sisters. Then you shut us up in a little cramped cage; one for each of us alone. You brought us to your country, to a laboratory prison. From then on, I have not seen the sun again. My cage is small, cramped and cold, without soil, without sun, wind and rain and without a brother or sister. I am alone, filled with fear and without hope. Every day they take me out of the cage, force a tube into my stomach and give me some kind of medications. Then they put a needle in my arm and take blood. They beat me and scream at me.

How is this to end? I have seen a big metal container into which they have thrown a dead fellow prisoner. Will this also happen to me? What all will I have to suffer until then?«

»Already before my birth, you modified my genes so that I would be born to become sick with cancer. You left me no chance to be healthy. Now the cancer in my body is growing bigger and bigger. This causes me pain when I go to sleep at night. I wake up in the morning with pain again; then I have pain the whole day long, until evening when I fall asleep again. You don’t seem to notice this at all. However, I have my own language, with which I can communicate. It is so fine that usually you cannot hear it with your ears. I can also communicate with my body language, by putting my ears up or down, or stretching out my body or drawing it in. I express my feelings with my whole posture. Don’t you notice this?

With my fine nose, I can smell everything very precisely; with my fine whiskers, I can perceive my surrounding and also find my way around well in the dark. My whiskers react very sensitively to every touch, but you pay no attention to this. Every time you grasp me and lift me up, I have panicky fear, because I don’t know what you are planning to do to me. My heart beats in my throat and sometimes I think it’s going to jump out of my chest. All my muscles twitch in anxiety. This mortal fear lasts for hours, until you put me back in my cage again.

What more must I suffer? And for how long? For I am not to blame that you become sick and I cannot make you healthy again either.«