Animal+Experimentation

Animal experimentation is a unique issue when looking at the relationship between humans and animals: In animal experiments pain, suffering and distress are deliberately inflicted on animals, whereas in other fields this would be regarded an illegal mistreatment. The most common laboratory animal species are rats and mice. The number of fish used in experiments is constantly rising as these animals are increasingly used in environmental investigations. Almost all animal species that are kept as pets are also used in research and testing, like hamsters, guinea-pigs, cats and dogs. Primates are also used widely in many areas, and being imported from breeding colonies in third countries where they are oftentimes bred under questionable conditions. Also, a lot of research is carried out on so-called farm animals (pigs, cows, horses, poultry). Russel and Burch defined:  • //replacement// as ‘employing non-sentient material which may replace methods which use conscious living vertebrates’,   • //reduction// as ‘lowering the number of animals used to obtain information of a given amount and precision‘, and   • //refinement// as ‘decrease in the incidence of severity of inhumane procedures applied to those animals, which have to be used’. In many countries animal welfare legislation was enacted in the 19th or 20th century, and sometimes it also covered animal experimentation. Legislation on animal experimentation mostly stipulates that an ethical decision is made whether an animal experiment is to be authorized, and lays down the basic parameters for that decision. The major problem of ethical evaluation of animal experiments, though, is in the supposed “weighing” the “cost” for the animals, i.e. their suffering, against the supposed “benefit” i.e. the purpose of the experiment. Another restriction to the potentially wider interpretation of the term animal experiment is to be seen in the fact that, particularly in legislation (see below), it is normally only used in connection with experiments on //live// animals. This means that if animals are killed, and experiments are carried out after their death, these are not regarded animal experiments in the legal sense.
 * Kolar, Roman. "Animal Experimentation." //Science & Engineering Ethics// 12.1 (2006): 12. Print. **

In many areas, such as physiology, animals are examined rather as “machines” and individual functions of their body are investigated in more or less painful procedures. Oftentimes single “parameters” (=body functions) are artificially altered (e.g. mechanically, biochemically, or by genetic engineering) to observe effects.

Disease models are created mostly either by deliberate feeding of toxic substances or genetic engineering. In surgical research (but not only there), also physical injuries are inflicted on animals, such as breaking their bones, burning their skin, etc.

As the safety and efficacy of biologicals has to be demonstrated for each production unit (batch) for regulatory purposes, these tests are carried out routinely, thus resulting in huge numbers of animals used.

Whereas the fundamental ethical standpoint of abolitionists was (and is) that man has the responsibility not to inflict pain and suffering on his fellow-beings for his own benefit, more than 200 years ago there already were attempts to distinguish between “ethical” and “unethical” animal experiments by defining conditions under which animal experiments would seem legitimate.

Legislation to regulate the use of animals for scientific purposes dates back to the //Cruelty to Animals Act// that was established in the UK as early as in 1876.

From an animal welfare point of view the above mentioned regulations have proved to be of limited efficiency as is demonstrated by the reality of animal experimentation today, which still allows for performing animal experiments for even the most absurd purposes, and for grievances in laboratories and housing facilities that are beyond imagination.

The final decision to authorize, and therefore officially legitimate on ethical grounds, an animal experiment is mostly taken by a licensing authority which oftentimes bases this decision on the advice of an ethics committee.

Not all animal experiments undergo an ethical evaluation process. For example, regulatory demanded tests, that make up to about 30% of all animal experiments, in many places (e.g. in Germany) do not have to be justified or evaluated by an ethics committee.