Government figures show that each year around 2,500 monkeys are used in biomedical research and testing in the UK. The number of monkeys used is relatively small compared with numbers of rodents and other experimental animals: over 1.9 million animals were used in experimental procedures during 2016, the great majority being rats and mice.
Of the primates that were used in research, over 80% (mostly marmosets and macaques) were involved in safety testing of new drugs and vaccines. There is a legal requirement for these to be tested in animals before they can be used in human patients, and in some cases the monkey is the best model for these tests.
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