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Swiss animal welfare group starts referendum
One of the main animal welfare organisations in Switzerland, the STS, is calling for a national referendum on animal welfare which will include provisions that could change the legislation regulating animal experimentation. Under the Swiss constitution, if an organisation gets the signatures of 100,000 voters on an initiative, the government is obliged to hold a national referendum on it. If a majority of the votes cast in the referendum are in favour, the changes demanded in the petition become law immediately.
The STS initiative covers a wide range of animal welfare issues and proposes a number of changes to animal welfare regulations concerning farms, zoos, pets and laboratory animals. In Switzerland experiments are assigned to three different levels of animal suffering: mild, moderate and severe. The STS initiative proposes that all experiments in the severe category would be banned. It also proposes that scientists would be required to prove that there are no non-animal alternative methods which could be used before they are granted a licence to conduct animal research or testing.
"There were several other proposals for laboratory animal welfare that we would have liked to include," said Norma Schenkel of the STS, "but with such a broad initiative, covering so many aspects of animal welfare we had to be realistic about how much we could put in."
The STS petition will be formally submitted to the Swiss government at the end of July. There can be a significant delay before a referendum is announced and often the government produces a compromise proposal that is sufficient to persuade an organisation to withdraw their initiative before a referendum is held. Over the last 20 years there have been a number of referenda calling for a ban or much tighter controls on animal experimentation in Switzerland, but none achieved a majority vote