30 HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 
THE ACT OF 1876 
1. SCOPE OF THE ACT 
Act 39 & 40 Viet., Ch. 77, usually referred to as The Cruelty to 
Animals Act (1876), regulates the use of animals for experiment. It is 
administered in England, Scotland and Wales by the Home Secretary. 
Similar legislation is in force in Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and Eire, 
and in certain other places. Licences granted by the Home Secretary and 
those granted elsewhere are not interchangeable. 
Relevant extracts from the Act are printed on pages 6 and 7 of every 
licence. Experiments carried out under the Act of 1876 are expressly 
excluded from the operation of the Protection of Animals Act, 1911, 
and the Protection of Animals (Anaesthetics) Act, 1954. 
The Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876, was based on the recommenda- 
tions of a Royal Commission which was appointed in 1875. A further 
Royal Commission was appointed in 1906, and produced a report six years 
later. It took the view that the pursuit of knowledge must recognize a 
limit to the pain which shall be inflicted on an experimental animal, but 
that it would be inconsistent and unreasonable to impose a greater 
restriction upon the infliction of pain for the advancement of knowledge 
than public opinion sanctions in the pursuit of sport, in carrying out such 
operations as castration and spaying, or in the destruction of rabbits and 
of rats and other vermin by traps and painful poisons (see Final Report 
of the Royal Commission on Vivisection, published 1912, p. 64). 
2. APPLICATION OF THE ACT 
The Act refers to experiments, calculated to cause pain, on living 
vertebrate animals (other than man). A procedure, to come within the 
Act, must be all of these things ; if it is only some of them, it is outside 
the Act of 1876, although it may come within the provisions of some other 
Act. 
The above terms are not defined in the Act of 1876, but the following 
may be taken as a guide to their interpretation. 
An experiment is a procedure, the outcome of which is not known in 
advance ; the animal is being used to provide an answer to a question. 
The inoculation of horses with tetanus toxin, for the production of 
antiserum, is not an experiment, and is therefore outside the Act. Killing 
animals does not come within the Act ; but, by a recommendation of the 
Second Royal Commission, the pithing of warm-blooded animals (but 
not frogs) is regarded as an experiment under the Act. 
A procedure is calculated to cause pain if it is liable to interfere in a 
material degree with the animal’s health, comfort or integrity. The term 
“ calculated ” is employed in an unusual sense, and pain thus has a 
very wide meaning. The injection into animals of female urine as a 
diagnostic test of pregnancy may induce ovulation or spermatogenesis 
which are normal physiological processes and are not calculated to cause 
pain ; it is therefore outside the Act. The injection of sterile water into 
a mouse, to demonstrate a technique to students, is neither an experiment 
nor calculated to cause pain, and is outside the Act. The diagnostic 
inoculation of guinea-pigs with material that may be tuberculous, and 
which may therefore interfere with the animal’s health, is regarded as 
coming within the Act. 
4 
