The Welfare of Animals Used in Research

Practice and Ethics

Robert C. Hubrecht

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781119967071
• eBook ISBN: 9781118783047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Veterinary Medicine

The Welfare of Animals used in Research: Practice and Ethics gives a complete and balanced overview of the issues surrounding the use of animals in scientific research.  The focus of the book is on the animal welfare implications and ethics of animals in research. It covers the topics with sufficient depth to show a real understanding of varied and complex subjects, but conveys the information in a beautifully reader-friendly manner.

Key features:

• Provides those who are not working in the field with a reasonable understanding as to why and how animals are used in research.
• Gives an introduction to the ethical issues involved in using animals, and explains how these are addressed in practice.
• Details the advances in animal welfare and the use and development of the 3Rs principles, and how these have become fundamental to the everyday use and regulation of animals used in research.
• The focus is on principles making it suitable for an international audience.

This book is a useful introduction to the issues involved in laboratory animal welfare for those who intend to work in research involving animals. It is also useful to prospective animal care staff and animal welfare scientists, and to those involved in ethical review. It will help inform debate amongst those who are not involved in experimentation but who are interested in the issues.

Published as a part of the prestigious Wiley-Blackwell – UFAW Animal Welfare series.  UFAW, founded 1926, is an internationally recognised, independent, scientific and educational animal welfare charity.

For full details of all titles available in the series, please visit the UFAW Animal Welfare series website.

1

Introduction

In this chapter I outline how animals have been used in history to advance human knowledge, how animals are used in research today, where research is carried out, how many animals are used, and the extent of various types of harm caused to them. This leads on to the need on ethical grounds to reduce harm to a minimum, public attitudes to research on animals, and the public’s role in permitting research on animals.

1.1 Reasons for Using Animals in Research

The history of the use of animals to advance human knowledge is long. Even in prehistory, the butchering of animals must have provided some insights into human anatomy and disorders for those who were wise enough to see. However, our earliest records of animal studies date back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle pioneered the experimental method and carried out dissections some 300 years BC, but he was certainly not an experimental scientist as we would recognise one today, his biological works being described by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Peter Medawar as ‘a farrago of hearsay, imperfect observation, wishful thinking and credulity amounting to downright gullibility’¹. Alcmaeon of Croton, while in Alexandria (305–240 BC), dissected a living animal to demonstrate the importance of the optic nerve for vision² and Erasistratus, a prominent physician in Alexandria (third century BC), used vivisection to distinguish between the sensory and the motor nerves. In the second century AD, Galen of Pergamum, a famous physician who became doctor to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, used dissection to study the continuity of the nervous system. The experience that he gained from these studies on animals led him to diagnose loss of feeling in the fingers of a patient as being caused by an injury to the spine. This was probably the first time that it was realised that neural problems could be referred from the actual point of injury.

With the arrival of the Renaissance and its associated flowering of scientific endeavour there was a renewed interest in animal experimentation that has continued to the present day. The following are just a few historical examples of the use of animals in studies on anatomy and physiology. William Harvey used living animals (including shrimp, eels, fish, pigeons, dogs and other mammals) to demonstrate the circulation of blood and, in 1661, Marcello Malpighi saw the capillaries as predicted by Harvey in dissected preparations of the frog lung and urinary bladder. In the 1800s, Claude Bernard studied glycogen and its relationship to diabetes, and Sir Charles Bell and Eduard Hitzig studied the nervous system. Incidentally, Bell was extremely reluctant to carry out his experiments, which, like others of the time, must have resulted in extreme animal suffering as this was before the discovery of anaesthesia³. More recently, animals have been used in research into the immune system, and in the development and treatment of diseases such as anthrax, poliomyelitis, influenza, asthma and tuberculosis, blood transfusion, various cancer treatments, muscular dystrophy and neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease amongst many others⁴. In addition, animals have been, and are, used in a wide range of fundamental research including studies to gain knowledge about animal or ecological systems, and ways of improving animal health, welfare, productivity or performance⁵. Animals are also used in the safety testing of pharmaceutical and household products as well as environmental safety testing of chemicals, the legal requirement for which, in Europe, depends on the tonnage of the chemical produced per annum⁶.

Today published statistics provide an overview of the types of research in which animals are used. For example, UK statistics on animal use for 2011⁷ show that fundamental biological research accounted for 35% of the total procedures carried out on animals⁸, applied human medicine 13%, applied veterinary medicine 5%, and protection of humans, animals or environment 3%. Only 1% of procedures were used in the direct diagnosis of conditions while 43% involved animals in breeding programmes, a category that includes harmful mutant animals and genetically modified animals⁹. The development of genetic modification and mutant techniques has resulted in greater numbers of animals, particularly mice and fish, being used in fundamental research aimed at elucidating gene function and the control of genetically mediated disease. This has been a contributing factor to the reversal of the downward trend in the use of animals in research in the UK seen in the mid 1990s¹⁰. However, the UK statistics have recorded all animals bred with a genetic modification unless the researcher can prove over two generations that there is no welfare impact. In practice this means that all have been recorded, even though some are simply used for breeding purposes, are not used directly in research and may not show any ill effects (possess a harmful phenotype). Some have argued that this practice artificially increases the statistics of animal use, but others have pointed to the various harms caused in the production of genetically modified animals. However, implementation of European Directive 2010/63/EU will change the reporting requirements so that those shown not to possess a harmful phenotype will not need to be reported¹¹.

1.2 Where Animal Research is Carried Out

There are various types of institution in which animal research is carried out. Universities and non-profit organisations use animals in fundamental studies, or work in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies. Academic research includes areas such as neurobiology, gene function, and metabolism, but animals are also used in more applied settings such as studies on Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease. Academic research also includes studies of behaviour or animal welfare that may sometimes be carried out outside the laboratory. Pharmaceutical companies use animals in the research and development of medicines. In these studies animals are used in trials of efficacy of potential drugs and to assess their likely toxicology. Some of this research, typically the efficacy studies, is usually done in-house by the company developing the medicine, while the toxicology studies necessary to obtain a licence from the drug regulators¹² to market the drug may be carried out by independent contract research organisations (CROs). However, there has been an increasing trend for contracting laboratories to offer more and varied research services to the pharmaceutical companies. In addition, CROs carry out safety and environmental toxicity testing of non-pharmaceutical chemicals. Organisations that breed animals for research may also carry out certain types of research, and have begun to offer some of the services traditionally provided by CROs. A further category of research institution is government or other public research facilities. These include establishments whose function may be to monitor and provide advice on serious health risks to the population, monitor and control the standards and quality of biological products, research into agricultural or pest-related issues, or counter defence threats.

1.3 Numbers of Animals Used

The number of animals used in experiments is not trivial. Statistics from the UK¹³ show that, in 2011 for example, over 3.79 million procedures were started that were likely to cause pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm to animals (this figure is more than the 3.71 million animals used as some re-use of animals is permitted); 77.5% of these procedures were carried out on mice, rats or other rodents, while other mammals (a category that includes dogs, primates, cats, ferrets, etc.) accounted for only 2% of procedures and fish were used in 15% of procedures. As we shall see in Chapter 6, despite a fall in animal use in the 1980s and 1990s, the development of genetic modification technologies has resulted in increased use of certain animals, particularly mice.

This, however, is only one country. Unfortunately, as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics¹⁴ points out, statistics for other countries can be hard to come by and are not necessarily equivalent. For example, the Animal and Plant Health Information Service (APHIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture publishes statistics on the numbers of animals used in research in the USA in each state by fiscal year (Table 1.1), but the numbers used seem very small (approximately 1.1 million animals per annum) compared with equivalent statistics for the UK. The discrepancy between the UK and US figures is, however, easily explained. In the USA the Animal Welfare Act excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus and mice of the genus Mus bred for use in research. As these in the UK account for just over 87% of the total procedures, a more reasonable estimate of the animals used annually in the USA might be 8.6 million. Using available statistics and estimates of this sort, it has been estimated that fewer than 60 million animals are used worldwide in research¹⁵. Whatever the exact figure, it is clear that a significant number of animals are used for research purposes and that this justifies serious ethical consideration. However, it is easy to be seduced by numbers, especially when you have nothing with which to compare them. So to provide some perspective, let us turn to the food industry. Many of the animals produced for food suffer some welfare compromise in the processes of breeding, production, transport and slaughter, and the number that we use is truly astonishing. To take just one animal that we breed and kill for food: in 2011, provisional figures suggest that 931 million broiler chickens were slaughtered in the UK¹⁶, and many broiler birds suffer welfare problems such as lameness and ascites¹⁷. Does this then mean that we should ignore the issue of animals in research? I would argue not. Numbers can be a useful tool to target and prioritise resources effectively, but it would be wrong to use the fact that more animals are used in the food industry to suggest that the laboratory animal issue is less important. After all, for each animal, it is the personal experience that is important, not the numbers of its fellow sufferers.

Table 1.1 United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Information Service (APHIS) Annual Report on Animal Usage by Fiscal Year. Fiscal Year 2010, published 27 July 2011.

Source: http://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_welfare/efoia/7023.shtml,http://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_welfa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Use of Legislative and Other Controls on Animal Research to Meet Public Expectations and Improve Animal Welfare
• 3 Animal Rights and Animal Welfare: Philosophy and Science
• 4 Species Choice and Animal Welfare
• 5 The Harm–Benefit Judgement
• 6 Improving the Welfare of Animals Used in Research: The 3Rs
• 7 Science and Animal Welfare: A Partnership
• References
• Glossary
• Index