Animal rights activists frequently use images of animals which do not offer a fair representation of research. Photos are often from other countries, out of date, or entirely out of context. Consider the primate image below, which can also be found on placards of demonstrators in 1980 (See Animals’ Defender – Jan/Feb 1981, p6).

It is up to scientists to help rebalance this. If you want to see the scale of the problem then I recommend you Google ‘animal testing‘ or even ‘animal research‘ and look at the huge number of unrepresentative images.

A number of Canadian researchers recently helped us take a step in the right direction. They went to their labs and took some photos of animals and provided Speaking of Research with the rights to the picture (see pictures below). We are now sharing these under the Creative Commons By Attribution (CC BY). This means you can use and share the image provided you mention it came from “www.speakingofresearch.com”. By providing these on Creative Commons we can help spread them far and wide. Next time you see a media story about animal research, would you rather see our pictures, or the ones sent by activists?

We need you. We need as many pictures as possible. We need you to provide us with the right to the picture so that we can release them to the world CC free, with an attribution license that will send people back to our website to discover accurate information about animal research.

We need pictures of animals in enclosures, pictures of the refinements in animal housing, pictures of animals undergoing procedures. We need all species, especially the mice, rats, birds and fish than make up around 95% of research subjects.

Pictures should be sent to contact@speakingofresearch.com

Take a photo of your animals and help combat the misrepresentation of animal research. Tweet this!

See some of our existing images below: (Click to enlarge)

Beagle in research. CC-BY: Speakingofresearch.com Research rat eating Rabbit in research Hamster in research Hamster animal research CC-BY: Speakingofresearch.com Research mouse being held. CC-BY Speaking of Research Degu in research facility Brush-tailed rat in research Mice in research laboratory Asian House Shrew pups

You can find all our photos permanently based on our resources page. This is along with our background briefings on animal research and other materials.

Speaking of Research