A spokeperson for Springer Nature, which publishes Nature, says: “As part of the peer-review process, our editors carefully evaluate requests by reviewers for animal studies and any arguments made against this by the authors."

The spokeperson adds that at all times, its journal editors follow the Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments guidelines 2.0, which were last updated in 20202. Nature is editorially independent of its publisher.

So a non-statement. The whole point is that the guidelines used by journals are informed by this bias towards creating animal-based models for everything.