Doctors Against Animal Experiments

The organization was founded in 1979 by the neurologist couple Margot and Herbert Stiller along with other doctors in Hamburg. Two years earlier, Mr. and Mrs. Stiller had already published the book "Animal Experiment and Animal Experimenters". They were among the first to question animal experiments from a scientific point of view and to shed light on the harm that animal experiments cause to humans.

Educating the public about the methodological fallacy of animal testing has been the focus of the association from the very beginning. In the pre-digital era, the board members and active members mainly shared publications, wrote letters to decision-makers, gave lectures both in Germany and abroad, published books and articles, and answered questions from the media. In 1990, the first edition of the book "The Myth of Animal Testing" by Dr. Bernhard Rambeck was published. The author dispels and refutes the ten most common reasons repeatedly put forward for animal experiments. The core of the association’s work raising awareness for animal testing and educating the public on the multiple fallacies of the system. Their publications, campaigns, and projects are based on in-depth research by a team of scientists. In addition to educating the public, DAAE also organizes its own congresses, gives lectures to interested specialist audiences, connects with political decision-makers, and takes legal action on behalf of animals in laboratories. Their numerous nationwide working groups propagate the association’s standpoints and research by regularly organising information stalls, action days, and demonstrations.

Since 2009, the association had been campaigning against brain research on rhesus monkeys at four institutes in Tübingen. In 2014, one of them, the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, hit the headlines when recordings were published showing severe mistreatment of the monkeys. Doctors Against Animal Experiments filed a criminal complaint with the public prosecutor's office in Tübingen in January 2015.

Following those revelations, Marco Wehr accused the association of a lack of proximity to players in medical research and of insufficient expertise in a guest article in the FAZ in 2017. Among others, he criticized DAAE for campaigning for replacement of animal experiments with cell cultures and computer models, as these could only inadequately reproduce complex biological processes and were therefore, in his opinion, insufficient for researching longer chains of action.

In December 2018, Volkart Wildermuth announced in an interview that the trust between the Logothetis working group and the Max Planck Society had permanently been damaged. According to Wildermuth, the MGP had restricted some of Nikos Logothetis' management functions where animal experiments were concerned. The public prosecutor's office in Tübingen discontinued the proceedings against payment of a fine.

In 2022, autopsy reports from the Stuttgart Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Office from 2009 were published. They showed that the skulls of monkeys that had been experimented on in Tübingen had numerous drill holes and a fracture, among other things. A total of six monkey cadavers were delivered from Tübingen, three with and three without heads. According to the autopsy reports, the skull manipulations caused much more suffering to the animals than is legally permitted in animal experiments.