The movement to end animal experimentation entered a decisive new chapter in 2025 and is accelerating rapidly in 2026. Across laboratories, government agencies, military facilities, and international regulatory bodies, long-standing practices that subjected animals to painful, outdated, and often scientifically unreliable testing are being challenged, dismantled, and replaced with modern, humane alternatives.
At Sustainable Action Now, our mission is rooted in one uncompromising principle: no animal should suffer for human convenience, profit, or outdated science. Over the past year, relentless advocacy, public pressure, and scientific innovation have delivered real victories that are changing policy, funding priorities, and global standards. Monkeys, mice, dogs, cats, and countless other animals are being spared suffering, and momentum continues to build toward the ultimate goal of permanently shutting down animal experimentation labs.
To explore the broader scope of our advocacy and investigative reporting on this issue, readers can visit our coverage on animal and wildlife testing.
A Historic Shift in U.S. Federal Policy
One of the most consequential breakthroughs arrived through the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. For the first time in history, the U.S. Department of Defense was legally defunded from conducting experiments on dogs and cats. These experiments, long criticized for their cruelty and questionable scientific value, had persisted for decades under federal contracts. Their removal from the defense budget represents a permanent structural shift away from military animal testing.
At the same time, the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 entered its critical implementation phase. Passed at the end of 2025, the law is forcing the Food and Drug Administration to meaningfully prioritize non-animal testing methods.
Cell-based models, computational simulations, and advanced human tissue technologies are increasingly being accepted in place of animal data for drug development and sunscreen safety. This represents a foundational change in regulatory science, placing human-relevant research at the center of public health decisions.
Another milestone quietly reshaped military training standards nationwide. A new federal law that took effect on December 18, 2025, officially banned the use of live animals in live-fire trauma training. 2026 marks the first full year under this prohibition, ensuring that military personnel are now trained using sophisticated medical simulators rather than living animals.
Global Momentum Toward Animal-Free Science
Outside the United States, nations are advancing bold timelines to phase out animal testing entirely in key scientific fields.
South Korea is completing construction on a massive government-funded Animal-Free Center scheduled to open in 2026. Once operational, the facility will aim to generate at least 60 percent of national chemical safety data using non-animal technologies, positioning South Korea as a global leader in humane toxicology.
In the United Kingdom, regulators have committed to ending all skin and eye irritation and corrosion testing on animals by late 2026. These tests, historically among the most painful and controversial, will be replaced entirely with validated non-animal methods.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands delivered a major victory for wildlife protection by passing a nationwide public fireworks ban, set to take full effect by New Year’s Eve 2026. Fireworks have long been linked to mass animal injuries, wildlife deaths, and long-term behavioral disruption. This ban represents a landmark recognition of animal trauma as a public policy concern.
Protecting Wildlife Through Oversight and Legal Resistance
Advocacy efforts in 2025 also played a critical role in protecting vulnerable wildlife populations. In the United States, repeated legislative attempts to strip federal protections from gray wolves were successfully delayed. These victories preserved federal oversight through 2026, preventing premature delisting that could have exposed wolf populations to aggressive hunting and habitat loss.
In Washington state, scrutiny of wildlife governance intensified. A formal probe into the Fish and Wildlife Commission is continuing through 2026, examining transparency, ethics, and scientific standards in wildlife management decisions. This oversight aims to prevent politically motivated or ecologically harmful practices from dictating wildlife policy.
Science and Industry Begin to Catch Up
Perhaps the most transformative developments are happening within research institutions themselves. Major national campaigns have made 2026 a pivotal year for replacing lethal dose testing, historically used to determine toxicity thresholds by killing animals in large numbers. Human-relevant science, including organ-on-a-chip platforms and AI-driven modeling, is now proving faster, safer, and more accurate.
The National Institutes of Health entered 2026 with a renewed funding mandate that prioritizes human-based research technologies. This shift represents a fundamental reorientation of public research dollars away from outdated animal models and toward methods that directly reflect human biology.
The Road Ahead
These achievements are not symbolic. They represent enforceable laws, funding reallocations, and scientific mandates that are already reducing suffering in laboratories, military facilities, and wildlife populations worldwide. Yet this is only the beginning.
Sustainable Action Now remains committed to pushing further—until animal experimentation is no longer normalized, no longer funded, and no longer defended as necessary. The victories of 2025 and 2026 prove that change is possible, that compassion and science are not in conflict, and that a future free from animal testing is no longer a distant vision, but an unfolding reality.
