My questions I'd like to direct to Dr. Chandrasekera, . I hope I've pronounced that correctly. Mr. McClain had just talked about why we're not moving more quickly towards this non-animal testing. And I was wondering, there are three specific things that have been recommended by Humane Canada and Animal Justice.
And I'm wondering what your thoughts are. They, I'll just quickly go through them and turn it to you cause I know we don't have much time. But one of them was, including a target date to phase out toxicity testing on animals as a way to encourage faster progress towards this. The second was instead of including the replace, reduce and refine, removing, refine, I know you talked about defining it, but they suggest we remove that.
And secondly, as. Requiring it only being used as a last resort, especially by the ministry in Canada. And I just wanna read one quick thing from one of the, the animal justice, brief that was submitted. There. Most of the tests that are done on animals are fall into category E, which are the most toxic of the tests.
And these tests can involve forced ingestion, followed by vomiting, forced inhalation, causing throat and lung irritation, and burning to animals restrained in inhalation chambers. And then once it's done, the animals are killed. I mean, I think when the alternatives are, It behooves us to try and move more quickly to reduce the suffering of these sentient beings.
But your thoughts on these three things, please miss, Dr. Chandrasekera,
so I agree with the recommendations that were put forward by Humane Canada and Emma Justice. I've seen their briefs, and that this is long. And what I've proposed in my brief and that you will get to see soon is also along the same lines that you need to make the language a little bit more.
Specific, practical prac, practical and scientifically justified instead of reasonably possible. And also with refinement. We have to be a little careful here because for the foreseeable future, we are going to be using animals, and those animals deserve better care. So if we're going to be refining, my proposal is that, We need to make sure the procedures are being refined to minimize pain and suffering, and distress.
And not just improving cage size or giving them extra bedding. Um, so in that case, refinement will still play a role until we're able to replace all animal testing, which will take a little bit of time. And sorry, I forgot the last, last section that the thing that you mentioned, was the use of animal testing as a last resort.
So there are some, methods that we do not yet fully have replacements for. Developmental neurotoxicity is one of those examples. So what we need right now is to adopt everything that we have available at our disposal. The entire toolbox of new approach methods that we have, every disposal they need to be incorporated into every, protocol, every procedure possible, and at the same time, Big time into developing these technologies where we're lacking them.
And that's where we are lagging behind in terms of other countries as well, that United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, into development of these new methods. And I don't think the Canadian has government has done nearly enough, actually not enough at all, to move this field forward and by investing in the development, validation, and acceptance of these methods.
Thank you very much.