What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy by Larry Carbone

Author:Larry Carbone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2007-10-27T22:53:00+00:00

The 1985 amendment had a few major provisions. It mandated the formation of institutional animal committees both to oversee animal care and to review scientists' efforts to minimize animal pain in their animal use proposals. Each committee was to review, as part of its semiannual animal facility inspections, "(A) practices involving pain to animals, and (B) the condition of animals, to ensure compliance with the provisions of this Act to minimize pain and distress to animals" [(U.S.C. 7, section 13 (b)(3)]. In addition, any planned exceptions to the pain control provisions were to be filed with the committee.

Another new requirement was that scientists must now search for alternatives to any painful procedures in their experiments and report on that search to the committee. The 1970 rule that adequate veterinary care included prescription of painkilling medications became a requirement for the scientist to consult with the veterinarian on use of anesthetics. As with the mandated committee reviews and inspections, Congress was continuing what it started in 1970, to recognize a professional jurisdiction of pain management and to move it out of the autonomous domain of the researchers.

All of these issues required further elaboration in the standards and regulations that the USDA would craft over the next six years. The USDA began this process in 1986. Charged by Congress to update its regulations, it sought public input first, rather than posting proposed regulations for comment. Specifically, it wanted comments in four areas:

1. Exercise for dogs

2. Psychological well-being of nonhuman primates

3. A list of painful procedures that should require the use of anesthetics, analgesics, or tranquilizers in research animals

4. A list of major operative experiments from which an animal is allowed to recover, which should prohibit the same animal being used in another similar major operative experiment(Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service 1986)

The third and fourth points, of course, are entirely concerned with animal pain and strongly imply the USDA's willingness (congressional assurances to the contrary notwithstanding) to march through the laboratory door and start dictating scientific practices.' The USDAs first feint at updating management of animal pain was both proscriptive and prescriptive. It would all but outlaw some painful research practices and dictate terms for pain management for the remainder.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) was one of the few to respond on the USDA's stated terms (Regulatory Analysis and Development 1986). Whereas most scientists, veterinarians, and protectionists went for generalities, often claiming the impossibility (and rapid obsolescence) of developing any such list, the ALDF submitted a detailed and lengthy list of painful procedures. The ALDF, selfdescribed in 1986 as an organization of some 200 lawyers and 30,000 other supporters, reported on an 18-month study that it had been conducting with United Action for Animals. It had compared published research papers with USDA enforcement reports at the facilities where the studies were done and claimed that animal pain was consistently undercounted in annual reports to the USDA. It was certain that this information would encourage the USDA to develop a better selfreporting program that would allow better scrutiny of research institute reports.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.