[1] It was founded in 1898 by Irish writer and suffragette Frances Power Cobbe as the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection.

[3] The BUAV was formed in response to the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) supporting restrictive legislative proposals under Stephen Coleridge.

[4] Frances Power Cobbe did not want the Society to promote any measure short of abolition so she founded BUAV on 14 June 1898 during a public meeting in Bristol.

In recent years, the organisation has focused on a number of new areas, including the promotion of non-animal tested products; the European Union's REACH proposal to test tens of thousands of chemicals on millions of animals; and the use of non-human primates in experimentation.

These are audited accreditation schemes for retail companies which confirm that neither their products nor their ingredients are tested on animals.

Undercover investigations included the exposure of the breeding and supply of monkeys from Nafovanny in Vietnam for experimentation in Europe and the US.