With the recent publication of the Home Office statistics on procedures on animals in 2024, it seemed worth revisiting the issue of how we measure progress towards a world where no animal suffers for science.

Our goal is zero

At the highest, summary level, it’s easy – we want the number of animals used in procedures to be zero.

In fact, we don’t want there to be a publication on the Statistics of procedures on animals because there are no procedures, so such a thing doesn’t need to exist.

So when we at Rreplacing Animal Research look at what we’re doing and ask “Are we making a difference and how would we know?” the first answer that springs to mind is that the annual stats on procedures go down. But, of course, we do not have a monopoly on working to end the use of animals in labs, so how much of any change can we attribute to our own activity? And then there’s the external context that can affect things outwith anyone’s direct actions (remember COVID??).

How do we know we’re on track?

This issue of knowing that what we’re doing is moving us along the pathway towards the world we want to see, that the change is demonstrable, and that we have not veered off our path (it’s easy to demonstrate you’ve done something, but harder to show it was the right thing) has occupied much of our time over the past year. The charity and other sectors (education, training) are littered with meaningless and made-up figures such as “97% of people who attended [and responded to the survey] were more confident with X after they’d done our course on X than they were before.” Well, duh.

Frankly, I’d be worrying about the 3% that weren’t. Such pre- and post-questionnaires are easy to implement and invariably positive, and so they are widely used.

Depth of impact is our motivating force

We now record a number of outputs, both qualitative and quantitative, and we have refined these over the past year to drive towards finding the actual evidence that matters, not just that which is easy to measure.

Not only do we want to track the number of universities we have engaged with, we want to know the number of animal-using establishments we have trained on the Replacement Checklist, for example. In this case, our goal is 100%, as this is the audience we most want to influence. Not only do we want to know how many events we’ve spoken at during the year, we want to know how many referrals we’ve had, as this signifies both our reputation within the sector as well as a depth of engagement from previous participants (they’ve considered the information worth sharing with their colleagues, who have then got in touch). We want to know the long-term impact of our grant funding. Has doing a summer studentship changed someone’s potential career path away from animal use?

The question for us then becomes “OK, we know our talk/course/session enhanced knowledge, but what does that mean for replacement?” How do we know if that knowledge translates into action and whether that action actually makes a difference to the end goal? It’s very challenging to capture and has led to some robust internal conversations along the lines of “OK, so I gave out 200 replacement checklists at that conference, but actually it’s the person that emailed me after to say that they’ve spoken to their AWERB Chair and this will be implemented going forward, that matters to me.” In a quantitative sense, the reach of 200 passive contacts sounds good, but we, and I think most people, would believe that the deep engagement shown by the one email is more meaningful.

Keeping us on course

Finding these things out continues to be a challenge – we work with a busy beneficiary group who are unlikely to fill out that feedback survey, however much they like us! – but it’s a critical tool nonetheless. If our killer question is our North Star, then impact measurement is our compass to ensure we are on the right path. And when the destination ‘Zero’ seems far away, we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, confident we are making progress in the right direction.