Talk:Animal testing/animal testing debate

The animal testing debate revolves around a number of key issues.


 * The scientific debate centers on whether using non-human animals as models for human disease is good science; that is, whether animal experiments are reliably predictive of the human responses they aim to mimic.
 * The animal welfare concern is how much suffering is involved, whether sufficient steps are taken in laboratories to relieve it, and whether the perceived benefits can justify it.
 * The humanist question is whether human beings have a responsibility not to cause suffering, even if the benefits of doing so are clear; and whether ignoring this responsibility causes callousness in researchers, leading to more animal experimentation for trivial reasons.
 * The animal rights focus is on whether animals are moral persons with an inherent right not to be treated as property; this position implies that animals should not be used in experiments no matter how good the science, or how real the benefits.

Much of the debate hinges on the extent to which human beings have a special moral status. A 2002 British House of Lords report on animal testing summed up the view of much of the research community: "The institution of morality, society, and law is founded on the belief that human beings are unique amongst animals," and are therefore morally entitled to use them for their own purposes. This belief is supported by two further beliefs: that there is a strong moral imperative to find cures and treatment for disease; and that, although all mammals have similar pain receptors and central nervous system pathways, the ability of non-human mammals to feel physical pain is tempered by their reduced capacity to anticipate and remember it.

An opposing position was summed up PETA president Ingrid Newkirk in 1992: "When it comes to having a central nervous system and the ability to experience pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."

Arguments on both sides of the debate rest of an inherent tension. Many anti-vivisectionists argue that non-human animals are so similar to human beings that they suffer just as human beings would do; but the same group also argues that animals are different enough to render their use as models of human disease unscientific. Many defenders of animal testing risk contradicting themselves too: they argue that animal models of disease work well because of their similar physicality, while denying that their cognitive and emotional lives are sufficiently similar that we must regard them as members of our moral community.

Species specificity
Some species figure more prominently in public debate than others. Larry Carbone, a laboratory-animal veterinarian and author of What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare, writes that each species plays its own role in the rhetoric and propaganda on both sides. Animals such as dogs fit well into what he calls the feminist care ethic and the inter-species social contract ethic, while the image of the monkey is consistent with the rhetoric of rights. The 1985 Animal Welfare Act singled both species out for special treatment &mdash; exercise for dogs, and environmental enrichment for monkeys &mdash; but as pro-testing lobby groups often point out, the overwhelming majority of vertebrate animals used in laboratories are mice and rats. Yet as Carbone writes, rodents "scurry in and out of public concern, excluded in one set of protections, second-class citizens in another." Carbone writes that research advocates have used the image of the second-class mouse to present animal testing, perhaps correctly, as mostly just "pricking mice with the point of a needle," as physiologist Samuel Wilks described it in 1881.

United States and Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees
Every institution in the U.S. that uses animals for federally funded laboratory research must have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), which reviews individual research proposals.

Case study: The Silver Spring monkeys
Psychiatrist Norman Doidge calls the Silver Spring monkeys the most famous lab animals in history. Starting in 1982, the legal issues surrounding them lasted ten years, led to the creation of PETA, the introduction of the Animal Welfare Act of 1985, and became the first animal testing case to be argued before the United States Supreme Court.

Talk back/food for thought
For the intro, the scientific debate is not entirely human-centric. For example, echolocation in bats has been famously studied, and the use of sonar by armed forces resulted from this science. This sort of work is called ethological, and it typically focusses on species that are much better at some ability than humans are (like bats and echolocation). Many people study animal systems to get at basic science goals too, and emulating the human condition is not a prerequisite. However, if you restrict animal testing arguments to medical arguments, then the human condition takes a far grander role.

Animal welfare in the USA is not concerned with how much suffering occurs. Scientific goals are stated at the outset, and animal suffering is SUPPOSED to be minimized while not getting in the way of scientific goals. The US system has no formal cost-benefit requirement like the British system. Most science comes from competitively awarded grants, so there is an implicit cost-benefit appraisal, but much of the conducted science is pilot studies not subject to such review. So, I think animal welfare is better stated as attempting to minimize the suffering while not interfering in scientific goals. But more to the point, I would omit the animal welfare point altogether, and replace it with a point stated more like this.

"The suffering vs gain concern centers on whether the necessary suffering is worth the scientific gain achieved in scientific studies. It is a certainty that nearly any scientific gain requires some increment in animal suffering. Where to draw the line in a cost-benefit analysis is not clear, and as new knowledge about animals occurs, that line moves, from year to year, and decade to decade, and it typically has moved to favor the animals."

This statement is a very accurate reflection of what I see happening from day to day and year to year in science, and is, by far, the most relevant issue for people working in animal research. What is allowable changes! And it changes based on logical, valid, concerns for animals! Scientists are generally not educated enough on welfare, and clinical veterinarians marginally so. And as education on welfare and necessity increases, procedures change. As a side effect, research also becomes more costly. And just so we're not TOO disjointed, you mostly say the same points I make above - but I think "animal welfare" is a bad term, if used in the USA it means any scientific rationale comes first - animal welfare merely means adhering to standards as long as they do not interfere with testing goals.

The section on species specificity should make a note that it is a tenet of the european and US systems that animals phylogenetically more primitive are to be preferred unless there is a scientific justification for using a "higher" animal (one of the three Rs). This is a formal goal (although in the US system IACUCs will accept very flimsy excuses). I suppose it would become quite a fight if someone wanted to use an Ape or an endangered species, the IACUC would realize it had to have a cost-benefit to rely upon, but when it comes to using a rat or a cat or a monkey, and all would be purpose-bred, any excuse will do. However, there must be a justification for EVERY use of a species in an IACUC protocol - this is a formal requirement, and no protocol would be passed without it.

IACUCs. The formal role of the IACUC is to enforce the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory animals, as per the Health Research Extension Act 1985. Every vertebrate animal must have its animal welfare regulated to the levels in the Animal Welfare Act, as well as adhere to all local laws. However, scientific goals come first. That is, anesthesia, analgesia, euthasia, food, water, caging, and enrichment (and maybe some other attributes of welfare I cannot recall presently) must all meet certain standards, unless the scientific goals require otherwise. And generally scientists walk that line, and some standards are not met, others are, depending on the experiments. But any standard not met must be formally justified by scientific necessity in the protocol.

I'll try to get back with citations in the next week or so. --Animalresearcher (talk) 03:42, 17 December 2007 (UTC)