•Switzerland will vote for the fourth time on Sunday on whether to become the first country to entirely prohibit medical testing on animals. Animal rights activists want a complete ban on experimentation on living animals, and they've amassed enough backing to hold a referendum in the country, which has a thriving pharmaceutical industry.

•In Switzerland, more than 5,50,000 animals died in laboratory tests in 2020, according to government statistics. There are approximately 4,600 dogs, 1,500 cats, and 1,600 horses among the 4,00,000 mice and rats. During and after the studies, primates, pigs, cows, birds, and fish were also slaughtered.

•According to the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office, over the last ten years, almost 6,00,000 animals have been utilized in research. The figure, on the other hand, is steadily decreasing.

•Swiss voters will be asked to pass a ban on animal testing for the fourth time in the country's history. They've already voted down three citizen initiatives on the subject: in 1985 (70% opposed), 1992 (56% opposed), and 1993 (56% opposed) (72 per cent against). The most recent initiative aims to outlaw all animal and human experimentation, as well as the importation of any new items created via such testing.

"Experiments on living creatures are useless and inhumane, and I am confident we can create treatments without them," Renato Werndli, a doctor from northeast Switzerland who spearheaded the campaign under Switzerland's direct democracy system, said.

•The referendum's outcome will have legal force.

•Each nation has its own method of counting animals used in research. Official figures say that laboratories in Germany and France experimented on 2.9 million and 1.8 million animals, respectively, in 2019.

•In Switzerland, most experiments on living creatures are carried out by businesses and universities. In 2020, over 60 per cent of these procedures were performed during basic biology research, like harvesting of cells and organs, or testing of scientific hypotheses.

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