Earlier this month, Rise for Animals got a rare, unfiltered glimpse behind the animal research industry curtain by attending a training session for animal researchers hosted by one of the industry’s own propaganda machines: Understanding Animal Research (UAR).

And what we witnessed was telling.

This wasn’t a science seminar. It was a crash course in manipulation with the goal of teaching animal researchers how to lie to the public – to us – about what they do and why.

But, first, in an unguarded moment, UAR let the industry mask slip, admitting what we’ve long known: animal research raises serious moral and ethical concerns and doesn’t often translate to humans.

UAR admitted — not just that there are “negative aspects” to commodifying and brutalizing nonhuman animals in labs — but that animal research presents a “significant moral and ethical challenge” and that the existence of “so much conflict” is “understandable.” Why? Because those of us who oppose animal research “hate suffering” and “care about justice”…

Then, in a quietly buried parenthetical on a presentation slide, UAR made a glaring concession: researchers should develop an understanding of “what therapies [their] animals are (potentially) contributing to.”

Potentially. As in: maybe, someday, somehow. Which is just another way of saying what we already know – that most animal research doesn’t (and isn’t even expected to!) help anyone but the researchers themselves.

Instead of reckoning with these facts, however, UAR quickly pulled its mask back up and got on with doing what the animal research industry does best: hiding behind half-truths and contradicting itself in an attempt to manufacture support by conveying (fake) legitimacy.

➤ UAR Claim: Opponents of animal research “misunderstand” science.
✔ Fact Check: No – we understand it too well. It’s animal researchers who deny basic scientific principles (like evolution), repeat useless experiments, and distort findings. In truth, anti-vivisectionists promote rigorous, ethical science, while the animal research industry suppresses it.

➤ UAR Claim: Opposition to animal research comes only from a “small but vocal minority”.
✔ Fact Check: Wrong again. Public opposition is rising – something UAR itself implicitly acknowledged when it referred to the existence of “so much conflict”. The poll numbers don’t lie, but the industry does.

➤ UAR Claim: Animal research has “huge social value” because it “alleviates suffering”.
✔ Fact Check: Most animal research doesn’t alleviate anything bad – it causes suffering (to the animals, the lab workers, and the humans awaiting treatments and cures). Even UAR admitted that it only potentially helps humans, and that’s the best-case scenario. In reality, it’s almost all suffering, fear, and death . . . for profit.

➤ UAR Claim: Animal research is “only done” to alleviate suffering.
✔ Fact Check: Then why is suffering the only guaranteed outcome? Again, this isn’t about the alleviation of anything bad – it’s about domination and greed – and the only thing reliably produced in animal labs is misery.

➤ UAR Claim: Human suffering is “of more concern” than animal suffering.
✔ Fact Check: That’s not science or ethics; that’s speciesism – discrimination against some beings simply because they aren’t human. It’s unscientific. It’s unjust. And it serves only to prop up an industry built on oppression and violence. 

➤ UAR Claim: If we don’t research on animals, “we are allowing human suffering to continue”.
✔ Fact Check: Actually, animal research is allowing human suffering to continue. The real “alternative” to animal research isn’t no research – it’s ethical, human-relevant research.

➤UAR Claim: Animal researchers “guarantee[] the welfare of” animals in labs.
✔ Fact Check: Animal research is built on incarceration, exploitation, and physical/psychological/emotional suffering – none of which are in any way conducive to “welfare”. When UAR tells researchers to focus on “pain” and avoid talking about “suffering”, the industry is admitting what it actually seeks to guarantee: optics, not ethics.

This training, like all of the animal research industry’s propaganda, is about protecting profitable human violence from public scrutiny. It’s about gaslighting the public into believing that torture is science.

Teaching animal researchers to lie, to use sanitized language, to dodge questions, to deflect blame, and to reframe torture as care, violence as necessity, harm as good, and dissent as ignorance is not about science.

It’s about marketing and manipulation. It’s about an industry teaching its foot soldiers how to spin abuse into virtue.

And, it must be called out and recognized for exactly what it is – and what it’s not – if we’re going to succeed in ripping off the animal research industry’s mask once and for all.

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