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New EU animal welfare action plan
Following the recent Commission-industry initiative on the 3 R's, the Commission launched a new action plan on animal welfare
In January, the European Commission announced that they were launching a "Community Action Plan on the Protection and Welfare of Animals 2006-2010." The objectives of the plan are to define EU animal welfare policy more clearly, to promote higher animal welfare standards and to support the Three R's approach to animal testing.
As with all such recent action plans, this one contained a number of broad and wide-ranging objectives and 'areas of action' as well as a list of specific actions. These specific actions included three relating to animal experimentation that were already part of the existing Commission programme: the Commission-industry partnership on alternatives to animal testing, the next report on the validation and regulatory acceptance of alternatives for cometic testing and the 'coordination of the Community position on the adoption' of the revised Appendix A of the Convention on animal experimentation.
The only new action was 'Preparatory work for the establishment of a European Centre-Laboratory for the protection and welfare of animals and the Validation of Alternative Testing Methods." The exact meaning of this is unclear. It seems unlikely that the Commission has forgotten that it set up the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods over a decade ago, so the most likely explanation is that this signals an expansion of EVAM's remit, to cover areas of animal welfare outside animal experimentation.