According to a press release from Animal Rights Sweden, Sweden’s Board of Agriculture and National Board for Laboratory Animals recently issued new regulations banning research on great apes and nine species of Gibbon apes. According to ARS, “Only non-invasive behavioral studies of these animals will be allowed in the future.”
The real effect of the ban is almost nil, however, as even ARS notes that currently there isn’t any research being conducted in Sweden on any of the animals covered by the ban. Nonetheless Animal Rights Sweden’s Per-Anders Svard said of the ban,
The decision marks an important shift in official policy, since it implicitly recognizes the individual moral worth of primates. Hopefully the ban can be seen as a first step towards extending moral and legal rights to millions of other animals suffering in experiments.
Source:
Sweden bans experiments on Great Apes. Press Release, Animal Rights Sweden, April 10, 2003.