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We won't always have to use animals for medical research: Here's what we can do instead

by Greg Williams and Laura Anne Thomas, The Conversation

Animals have been used for medical research for thousands of years, dating back to ancient Greece where the first dissections were performed.

These days, one of the main uses of animals is to ensure the safety of medical products before they're trialed in humans.

But in addition to the important ethical reasons for minimizing animal use, the reality is sometimes animals just aren't that good at predicting human responses. No animal model, for example, has captured all the human characteristics of complex illnesses like Alzheimer's disease or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (a neuromuscular disease). This makes is hard to develop effective treatments and cures.

Thankfully, researchers are making progress in developing a collection of alternative approaches, called "non-animal models." A new report from our team at CSIRO Futures examines the potential of non-animal models and the actions Australia will need to take to pursue their use.

What are non-animal models?

Non-animal models are an alternative set of models that use human cells, tissues and data.

These have the potential to better mimic human responses. In doing so, this can more accurately predict if a medical product is likely to fail, allowing reinvestment in products that are more likely to succeed.

Computer simulations or "in silico models" are one example. These can be used across the medical product development process to complement—and in time potentially replace—other model types. They can be used in drug studies to model a drug's behavior within the body, from cellular interactions to processes that involve multiple organs.

Complex three-dimensional biological models are also maturing quickly. Examples include:

organoids —organ "buds" that can be propagated from stem cells or taken from biopsies

organs-on-chips —cells cultured in a miniature engineered chip. These attempt to replicate the physical environment of human organs.

What can we use non-animal models for?

In theory, we can use non-animal models for everything we use animal models for—and more.

Simple non-animal models ( human cells cultured over a flat surface) are already used to help identify drug targets due to their ability to test a large number of compounds and experimental conditions.

In the future, non-animal models will reduce—and eventually replace—animal use across a range of applications:

• screening potential drugs to see how well they work
• toxicology (safety) testing
• helping to screen, select and stratify shortlisted participants for clinical trials. This might include an assessment of their unique response to a potential drug.
• using patient cells to identify the treatment most likely to help that individual.

Outside of medical products designed for humans, non-animal models can also support innovation in veterinary and agricultural medicines, cosmetic testing and eco-toxicology.

An export opportunity for Australia

Non-animal models present an economic opportunity for Australia, where the models, their components, and surrounding services could be exported to the world.

Our novel economic analysis sized the potential Australian market for two non-animal models: organoids and organs-on-chips. Other models were unable to be sized due to a lack of global market data.

We estimate the Australian organoid market could be worth A$1.3 billion annually by 2040 and create 4,200 new jobs.

The organs-on-chips market could be worth A$300 million annually by 2040 and create 1,000 new jobs. This estimate is lower as this technology is currently less advanced but holds the potential to grow significantly beyond 2040.

Several Australian entities are already contributing to these opportunities. The Murdoch Children's Research Institute, for example, provides stem cell and modeling expertise as part of reNEW , a €300 million international collaboration .

Another example is from Schott Minifab , an international biotech and medical device company with Australian roots, which has successfully established scaled production of non-animal model components in Australia for domestic and export markets.

Making it a reality

Non-animal models have already begun to complement and replace animal use in some areas, such as identifying drug targets.

However, accelerating their development and adoption across a wider range of applications will require further technical advances to lower cost and validate their performance as superior models.

Australia has several research strengths in this field but we need a concentrated effort to help our research make it through to real world impact.

Our report makes ten recommendations for supporting Australia's pursuit of these opportunities. Critical activities over the next five years include:

• coordinating local capabilities
• investing in upgraded infrastructure
• creating and collating data that compares animal and non- animal model performance.

Governments, industry and research must collaborate to deliver against these actions. Success will only come from collective efforts.

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Ethical care for research animals

WHY ANIMAL RESEARCH?

The use of animals in some forms of biomedical research remains essential to the discovery of the causes, diagnoses, and treatment of disease and suffering in humans and in animals., stanford shares the public's concern for laboratory research animals..

Many people have questions about animal testing ethics and the animal testing debate. We take our responsibility for the ethical treatment of animals in medical research very seriously. At Stanford, we emphasize that the humane care of laboratory animals is essential, both ethically and scientifically.  Poor animal care is not good science. If animals are not well-treated, the science and knowledge they produce is not trustworthy and cannot be replicated, an important hallmark of the scientific method .

There are several reasons why the use of animals is critical for biomedical research: 

••  Animals are biologically very similar to humans. In fact, mice share more than 98% DNA with us!

••  Animals are susceptible to many of the same health problems as humans – cancer, diabetes, heart disease, etc.

••  With a shorter life cycle than humans, animal models can be studied throughout their whole life span and across several generations, a critical element in understanding how a disease processes and how it interacts with a whole, living biological system.

The ethics of animal experimentation

Nothing so far has been discovered that can be a substitute for the complex functions of a living, breathing, whole-organ system with pulmonary and circulatory structures like those in humans. Until such a discovery, animals must continue to play a critical role in helping researchers test potential new drugs and medical treatments for effectiveness and safety, and in identifying any undesired or dangerous side effects, such as infertility, birth defects, liver damage, toxicity, or cancer-causing potential.

U.S. federal laws require that non-human animal research occur to show the safety and efficacy of new treatments before any human research will be allowed to be conducted.  Not only do we humans benefit from this research and testing, but hundreds of drugs and treatments developed for human use are now routinely used in veterinary clinics as well, helping animals live longer, healthier lives.

It is important to stress that 95% of all animals necessary for biomedical research in the United States are rodents – rats and mice especially bred for laboratory use – and that animals are only one part of the larger process of biomedical research.

Our researchers are strong supporters of animal welfare and view their work with animals in biomedical research as a privilege.

Stanford researchers are obligated to ensure the well-being of all animals in their care..

Stanford researchers are obligated to ensure the well-being of animals in their care, in strict adherence to the highest standards, and in accordance with federal and state laws, regulatory guidelines, and humane principles. They are also obligated to continuously update their animal-care practices based on the newest information and findings in the fields of laboratory animal care and husbandry.  

Researchers requesting use of animal models at Stanford must have their research proposals reviewed by a federally mandated committee that includes two independent community members.  It is only with this committee’s approval that research can begin. We at Stanford are dedicated to refining, reducing, and replacing animals in research whenever possible, and to using alternative methods (cell and tissue cultures, computer simulations, etc.) instead of or before animal studies are ever conducted.

Organizations and Resources

There are many outreach and advocacy organizations in the field of biomedical research.

• Learn more about outreach and advocacy organizations

Stanford Discoveries

What are the benefits of using animals in research? Stanford researchers have made many important human and animal life-saving discoveries through their work. 

• Learn more about research discoveries at Stanford

Using animals for scientific research is still indispensable for society as we know it

Senior Advisor Animal Ethics and Outreach, Donders Centre for Neuroscience, Radboud University

Professor, Radboud University

Associate Professor in Neuroinformatics, Radboud University

Disclosure statement

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Kenya’s national airline – Kenya Airways – made headlines when it announced it would stop transporting monkeys for animal research. This followed an accidental highway crash in Pennsylvania , in the US, which involved a truck transporting monkeys that had been bred in Mauritius for laboratory experiments in the US.

Following the accident, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) US, an animal rights group, contacted Kenya Airways urging them to reconsider transporting the animals, putting forward their view that animal experimentation is a cruel industry.

Read more: The macaque monkeys of Mauritius: an invasive alien species, and a major export for research

Such an incident is indeed tragic. But if we consider the number of people who would have died without the existence of medication and novel medical technologies developed thanks to animal research, then ending animal research could lead to a more tragic outcome in the longer term.

Most countries do animal research, perhaps not very tiny countries or very poor countries. There is a nationwide ban on animal testing for cosmetics throughout the European Union, Israel, Norway, as well as in India. But animal testing for other reasons is still widely accepted.

Most of the animals used come from commercial breeders – one is Jackson Laboratory in the US. Other sources include specialist breeders and large breeding centres which can provide genetically modified animals for specific research. The animal testing facilities themselves may also rear animals.

In general, all over the world, policymakers do aim to move towards animal-free methods of scientific research and have introduced very strict regulations for animal research.

Scientists and policymakers share the long-term goal of reducing animal use in scientific research and where possible eventually even stopping it. It’s an ambitious goal. For this to happen, animal-free methods need to be developed and validated before they can become a new standard.

Animal-free innovations have been developed for some areas of biomedical research, such as toxicology . However, most parties recognise that at present, not all research questions can be answered using only animal-free methods.

Based on decades of doing research on the human brain, which involves using animals, to us it’s clear that – for the foreseeable future – there remains a crucial need for animal models to understand health and disease and to develop medicines.

Unique knowledge

It is animal research that provides researchers with unique knowledge about how humans and animals function. Perhaps more than in any other field of biomedical research, complete living animals are needed to understand brain function, behaviour and cognition.

Behaviour and cognition, the final outputs of a brain organ, cannot be mimicked using any existing animal-free technologies. We currently simply do not understand the brain well enough to make animal-free solutions.

Another striking, very recent example that showed the current need for animal research is the COVID-19 pandemic . The way out of the pandemic required the development of a functioning vaccine. Researchers amazed the world when they made targeted vaccines available within one year. This, however, has relied greatly on the use of animals for testing the efficacy and safety of the vaccine.

A key fact that remains often invisible is that the rules and regulations for conducting animal research are, in comparison, perhaps even stricter and more regulated, by for example the Animal Welfare act in the US and the European Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals used for Experimental and other Scientific Purposes in Europe. Than, for example, in the food and entertainment industry, although regulations are in place here too such as governmental rules for the treatment of animals in order to protect their health and wellbeing.

Should it be banned?

In the world as we know it today, animal research is still generally accepted as part of society. There are many important reasons why laboratory animal research is still needed:

To learn about biological processes in animals and humans.

To learn about the cause of diseases.

To develop new treatments and vaccines and evaluate their effects.

To develop methods that can prevent disease both in animals and humans.

To develop methods for the management of animals such as pests but also for the conservation of endangered species.

Of course many, animal researchers included, are hopeful that one day animal experiments will no longer be necessary to achieve the much needed scientific outcomes. However, the situation is that for many research questions related to human and animal health we still need animals.

As long as we cannot replace animals, there should be more focus on transparency and animal welfare, to benefit the animals as well as science. Awareness and financial support of this at the governmental level is key to enable animal researchers to always strive for the highest level of animal welfare possible.

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Can we end animal testing?

We find out whether innovative techniques using stem cells, computer modelling and 3D-printing could reduce the number of animals used in medical research.

Alla Katsnelson

There are many disagreements in the world of research, but few debates will get as heated as those surrounding animal testing. Many scientists and research advocates contend that animal experiments are crucial for learning about basic biology and disease mechanisms, and are necessary for testing the safety and efficacy of new medicines and chemicals. They point to many potent medicines that exist thanks to animal testing. Opponents, meanwhile, contend that subjecting animals to experiments for human gain is ethically unjustified. What’s more, many argue, such research is often misleading because it compares apples and oranges: results from animal studies often don’t translate to humans because the animals are just too different.

New methods

Animal welfare activists have long insisted that researchers jettison research on animals for alternative methods, such as human stem cells grown in a dish, computer modelling, or expanded clinical trials. But it’s only in the past few years that most of these tools have become truly good enough for prime-time use. Now, many researchers are embracing these alternatives. As Dr Donald Ingber, director of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, says, “It’s coming to a tipping point.”

Tallying the precise number of animals used in research is difficult, because countries record animal experiments differently. But estimates suggest that the count is more than 100 million animals each year worldwide. The majority are used in basic research and breeding to create specific genetic modifications. A smaller percentage of animals are used to test the effects of drugs or chemicals. More than 95 per cent of all animals used in research are mice, rats, birds and fish, but other species enter the mix, too. For example, some 60,000 monkeys like macaques are used in experiments in the US, Europe and Australia.

• The history of medicinal drugs helps explain our relationship with them today
• Hard labour: the case for testing drugs on pregnant women

It’s hard to deny that research on animals has advanced human health. In the 19th Century, for example, French biologist Louis Pasteur used animal experiments to understand how microorganisms can cause disease, and later to develop a vaccine for rabies. Animal studies were also crucial in understanding how insulin is produced and in developing ways to supplement it in people with diabetes. Penicillin was proven effective in mice, blood transfusions were perfected in rabbits, and kidney transplants were tested in dogs and pigs.

There’s no shortage of recent examples, either. Experiments in which macaques were infected with SIV, the monkey version of the AIDS-causing HIV virus, were crucial in creating antiretroviral medicines and in developing strategies for a potential HIV vaccine. Deep brain stimulation, used by some 20,000 people with Parkinson’s disease, relied on rat and monkey models to understand how the disease affects a part of the brain called the basal ganglia and how surgically implanting a stimulator could improve patients’ motor symptoms. And brain-machine interfaces that allow paralysed people to perform everyday tasks, such as bringing a coffee cup to their lips, are being developed with the help of experiments in monkeys.

A dying breed?

Yet many scientists would now agree that for some studies, animal experiments are no longer the best way forward. “Animal testing is an important tool – it has made our world safer and it has helped to develop certain drugs – but at the same time it has very often been misleading,” says Prof Thomas Hartung, a toxicologist and the director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He says that in just the past few years, there has been more agreement on the limitations of animal testing and “the belief that this is some type of gold standard is fading”.

Among researchers and the public, support for limiting animal research where possible seems to be growing. In the past few years, the European Union, Israel and India have banned animal testing for cosmetics, and other countries are considering similar laws. (The UK led the way with the first such ban back in 1989.) Countries throughout the world have largely phased out research on Old World primates such as chimpanzees, and in many regions the use of other non-human primates – as well as some other mammalian species – is also on the decline. Meanwhile, regulatory bodies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which have long insisted on animal studies, are beginning to evaluate whether alternative technologies can show similar or better results, says Ingber, and companies are trying to implement these tools into their pipeline.

Changing times

It’s not just ethical concerns spurring this change. Switching to studies that use human tissue instead of animals may often make for better science. Experimental medicines that seem to be effective in animals (usually rodents) often fail in human trials; 9 out of 10 cancer drugs, and 98 out of 100 neurological and psychiatric drugs that show promise in animal tests don’t turn out to work when tested in humans. Animal studies certainly don’t deserve the full blame for this disconnect, but finding better and more predictive disease models might help, researchers say.

There are also cases where a human disease simply can’t be modelled in animals. For example, Alysson Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, studies a rare but devastating neurological disease called Aicardi-Goutieres Syndrome (AGS). The mutations causing AGS are well-known, but when Muotri studied mice that had been genetically engineered to carry these mutations, he found that they had no symptoms. When his team grew cell structures called organoids from stem cells derived from tissues of patients with the disease, they recreated the nerve cells’ glitch. They learned that what causes the disease is an immune response to an element of DNA that is specific to humans. “It’s a case where we have a truly human disorder,” Muotri says. “We couldn’t see it in the mouse, and very likely we wouldn’t see it in a primate.”

One especially promising human cell-based alternative to animal research is so-called ‘organ-on-a-chip’ technology, in which specific types of human stem cells are grown with membranes on a microchip to mimic the function of specific organs. “There are lots of things you can do on these chips that you can’t do in animal testing,” says Ingber, who has developed about 15 such devices, along with his colleagues, for mimicking the function of organs including the lungs, intestine, kidney and bone marrow. Each chip, the size of a computer memory stick, is engraved with tiny channels that are lined with human cells and artificial blood vessel tissue. The tools also capture physiological features such as blood pressure and mechanical forces that act on cells. Researchers can link up to 10 chips together with vascular channels containing human blood in order to study how organ systems interact.

“We’ve been able to mimic amazing things – diseases of all types, pulmonary oedema, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, inflammatory bowel disease, viral infection, drug toxicities – and we’ve been able to make chips with cells from patients,” Ingber says. These devices reveal drug toxicities that don’t show up in animal models, and can also probe questions that can’t be asked in clinical trials for ethical reasons. His team is using them to model the effects of radiation exposure, as well as childhood illnesses and malnutrition.

• Weird science: six unusual studies on our favourite livestock
• Nine unexpected effects of music on animals

But organs-on-a-chip aren’t just for university scientists. Roche Pharmaceuticals, one of the top five drug companies worldwide, embraced the technology three years ago and already uses it to test the safety of new compounds. “It opens a totally new field of opportunities to us in biology and drug discovery, and all of them are much better than an animal ever can be,” says Thomas Singer, Roche’s global head of pharmaceutical sciences. As this and other tools improve further, more companies have adopted them, banking on them being more reproducible and predictable than animal tests. “In the beginning we were very much on our own,” Singer says. “But I am convinced this technology will see a huge boost in development.”

Tiny organs

Other human cell-based alternatives to animal models are becoming available too. Prof Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina, is creating tissues and organs such as bladders and kidneys using a 3D printer that spits out different types of human cells. “You are miniaturising a human organ, really,” he says. Initially, his team built these organs for surgical use in the body, but he soon realised that they could be standardised and mass-produced in minutes – ideal specs for screening new medicines and testing their safety. Initially, he says, such technologies will just supplement the animal studies, but eventually they can replace them.

Toxicology studies, for medicines as well as for all sorts of other chemicals, are a low-hanging fruit for switching to alternative methods, explains Hartung. Many animal tests are particularly bad at predicting toxicity in humans, not to mention slow and expensive to conduct, and in many cases, more modern, cell- or computer-based assays have been developed. Pushing the issue, a European law passed a decade ago requires thousands of chemicals to be assessed for safety. Hartung and other toxicologists in academia and industry have developed a computer model that can predict the toxicity of a compound based on its similarity to others. “This is astonishingly powerful,” he says.

But despite the promise of all these techniques, experts say, change will probably come slowly, and it’s likely that some forms of animal models will never be eliminated at all. As Ingber puts it, “I think we are going to replace animal testing one model at a time.”

• This article was first published in February 2018

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• Book Review
• Published: 01 November 2001

Why Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research

• Judith K Blackshaw 1  

Heredity volume  87 ,  page 609 ( 2001 ) Cite this article

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Why Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research.

E. F. Paul and J. Paul. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, USA. 2001. Pp. 224. Price $49.95, hardback. ISBN 0-7658-0025-X

This thought-provoking book comes out of the Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation, an independent corporation established to promote advanced research in political philosophy and in philosophical analysis of public policy questions. The use of animals for medical research is being threatened by animal rights activists who propose severe restrictions or abolition of experimental work.

In their essays, the eleven American authors challenge many flawed perceptions promoted by animal rights groups. These include misrepresentation of historical facts, and the contributions to human and animal health, by the use of experimental animals. Fortunately, activists efforts so far have not slowed down progress of biomedical and pharmacological research. In much of the world with epidemiological and nutritional challenges any animal activist agenda to shut down or hinder animal research is, as one author comments “fanatical, even suicidal”. Several authors go further and argue that to deny much of the world's population hope for vaccines and other medical cures is inhumanity towards humans.

Some animal rights groups concede that applied research is justifiable but that basic research should be prohibited. As the author of one essay points out, this view jeopardises both the advancement of knowledge and the remediation of human disease.

The question is raised of how human and animal interests can be balanced. The European view gives greater significance to animal interests than the American approach. However, both are closer to the human-priority view than either the UK or German statutes, which are more towards equality in human and animal interests.

Several authors argue from the evolutionary perspective in defending animal experimentation. They suggest that to disallow the acquisition of medical and agricultural knowledge would be a maladaptive strategy, that may endanger human survival. The philosophical bases of the animal rights groups are discussed and the reader is required to carefully follow often unfamiliar arguments. However the end result is well worthwhile.

At the end of the book's introduction the hope is expressed that, ‘these essays will advance public debate on this vital issue.’ It is hard to imagine that the general public will read such a book, but hopefully the scientists and students who carry out animal based research will use the arguments when explaining and justifying their research.

There is a useful index and I found the endnotes for each chapter interesting. I would have liked an alphabetical list of literature references at the end of the book.

It becomes evident after reading this book that animal rights movements are only sustainable in affluent societies. It is the responsibility of these societies to work towards the alleviation of diseases, which much of the world suffers. This book should be welcomed by the research communities in all countries where animal based research is conducted.

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Ethics of Medical Research with Animals

The Moral Status of Invasive Animal Research

During the 1970s and 1980s, two veterinarians and I conceptualized, drafted, and ultimately, in 1985, persuaded Congress to pass federal legislation assuring some minimal concern on the part of researchers for the welfare of laboratory animals. [1]  As part of that activity, I had occasion to study the scientific community’s attitude toward the ethical issues emerging from the use of animals in biomedical research. I searched the scientific literature for an explicit articulation of the moral position underlying such use, but I found nothing save for an occasional gnomic statement such as, “Animal research is not a moral issue; it is a scientific necessity”—as if it could not be both. I came to see the failure of the scientific community to engage that issue as an inevitable consequence of what I have called “scientific ideology,” or “the common sense of science,” which is to science what ordinary common sense is to daily life. [2]

This ideology rests on two assumptions. One of them is that science is “value free” in general and “ethics free” in particular—that science, which concerns only what is observable or empirically testable, has no place for ethical judgments. The second is that scientists must be agnostic about consciousness (and pain) in animals. This assumption explains how it was possible that a literature search I performed in 1982 with the Library of Congress on “analgesia for laboratory animals” unearthed only two references, one of which merely affirmed that there ought to be papers on the subject. The ubiquity of the “common sense of science” ideology was dramatically illustrated when James B. Wyngaarden—then the director of the National Institutes of Health, arguably the chief biomedical scientist in the United States, and, therefore, science’s principal spokesperson—was reported as saying that “ethical issues such as gene sequencing are always controversial, but research should not be hampered by moral considerations.” [3]

Scientists, like any other subgroup of society, must operate within the boundaries of the consensus social ethic at a given historical moment or else risk loss of autonomy at the hands of restrictive social regulation or legislation. Our laws for research animals passed, despite very vigorous opposition from the research community, because they accorded well with burgeoning societal concern about the welfare of animals used for social benefit. In essence, the research community had failed to meet societal expectations for the proper treatment of research animals. A commitment to such treatment, particularly control of pain, should have been part of researchers’ professional ethics .

Even today, it is doubtful that animal researchers understand the social expectations regarding animal care and use. Historically, society has not had a robust, institutionalized ethic for how animals should be treated. Before the Animal Welfare Act, the only laws constraining animal use in society were the anticruelty laws forbidding sadistic, deviant, purposeless, deliberate, unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering on animals, or outrageous neglect. These laws, both by statute and by judicial interpretation, did not apply to socially accepted animal uses such as research or agriculture. Because the overwhelming use of animals in society was in agriculture, aimed at providing food, fiber, locomotion, and power, and because the key to agricultural success was having healthy animals, good husbandry and good care were enforced by the most powerful sanction, self-interest; the anticruelty laws were only there for society to manage sadists and psychopaths unmoved by self-interest. But with the emergence of new kinds of “normal” animal use—such as intensive agriculture and animal research, both of which caused animal pain and suffering that did not fall under the anticruelty ethic—society was forced to create a new ethic for animals that went “beyond cruelty.” The Animal Welfare Act was a start, but it did not address all of the ethical concerns that society has had about the treatment of animals. As evidence of the need for a new ethic for animals, thousands of bills pertaining to animal welfare have been promulgated across the United States in the last decade.

The new ethic for animals essentially applies much of our social ethic for humans, mutatis mutandis , to the treatment of animals and embodies the desired protections in the legal system. There are three layers of ethical concern regarding invasive research on animals:

1. What entitles humans to use animals in ways that harm, hurt, kill, or distress them in research for human benefit?

We cannot use humans—even socially disvalued human beings such as prisoners, mentally impaired persons, and unwanted children—for the benefit of the majority or of society as a whole without making sure that they understand the research and participate in it willingly. The researchers responsible for the Tuskegee experiments on untreated syphilis in black men argued that such people were “worth less” than other citizens, and thus, their interests could be sacrificed, without their informed consent, for the good of the majority. [4]  But any such position was categorically rejected when the study came to light during the 1970s, prompting detailed federal restrictions on the use of human subjects in research. So what are the arguments for using animals in these ways?

2. The only plausible argument for using human beings in these ways is the utilitarian one that they generate more benefits than costs.

Society has categorically rejected that claim. But perhaps, in the case of animals, such an argument is socially acceptable. If so, we are led to another ethical concern about the use of animals in scientific experimentation. If the only justification for it is the benefit it provides—and that this benefit far outweighs the cost to the animals—then it follows that the only allowable animal use in experimentation would be that it provides greater benefit than the cost to the animals. But this is clearly not the current state of affairs. Animals are deployed in painful ways in myriad experiments that do not provide significant benefit. These experiments range from toxicological experiments that only provide some legal protection for corporations from lawsuits regarding product liability, to experiments in pursuit of new weaponry, to psychological experiments designed to inflict learned helplessness on animals as a model for human depression (illegal in the United Kingdom), to seeing how many bites an “intruder” animal into an established animal colony sustains, to numerous other experiments augmenting knowledge that appears to be of no practical value. [5]

3. Given that practitioners of animal research essentially disregard the previous two ethical concerns, we are left with a third.

If researchers fail to attend to the question of our right to use animals in invasive ways and ignore the clear-cut moral demand that the benefits from the research outweigh the costs to the animals, at the very least common sense and common decency dictate that animals used in research should be treated as well as possible. But even if, as the research community claims, the vast majority of experiments performed on animals do not cause significant pain, 100 percent of research animals suffer because the environments in which they are kept fail to respect their biological and psychological needs and natures. Social animals are kept in isolation; nocturnal animals are kept in twenty-four-hour-a-day light; housing and husbandry conditions are designed in accordance with human convenience, not animals’ needs. Cage design is primarily determined by ease of cleaning, not animal comfort. Appallingly, even the death of the animals in the service of research is not the most painless and comfortable death possible. The vast majority of animals “euthanized” for research purposes do not get a “good death”; asphyxiation or suffocation by inhaled carbon dioxide is by no stretch of the imagination humane, despite its being approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association. AVMA is ostensibly the arbiter of humaneness of euthanasia, but its track record shows greater concern for human convenience than for animal welfare.

The only reference in the law to the many ways that animals used in research can suffer beyond the infliction of physical pain upon them—including fear, anxiety, separation from family and other animals of the same species, unnatural diets and food acquisition, severely truncated possibility of movement, denial of opportunities for play, disturbance of routine—is the statutory requirement that pain and distress be controlled. “Distress” is both a catch-all term and a placeholder for better understanding of the varied and subtle ways that animals used in laboratories can be harmed. Given the ideological resistance researchers have shown to even acknowledging physical pain in research animals, little progress on “distress” has been made by the animal research community.

The overwhelming majority of attention paid to ethical issues in category three has been devoted to control of acute physical pain and development of analgesic regimens. Little progress has been made in relieving chronic pain and in the control of any pain in farm animals used in research, since the Animal Welfare Act excludes agricultural animals. But an adequate account of animal ethics must transcend exclusive concern with pleasure and pain and recognize the full range of possible “matterings” unique to different sorts of animals. To accomplish this, we must look to Aristotle, the greatest common-sense philosopher of the ancient world, and specifically to his concept of telos , or animal nature, a root notion of his functional, teleological biology. Whereas modern biology focuses on reductionist, molecular, and mechanistic explanations, Aristotle’s biology emphasizes the unique set of traits and powers that make the animal what it is—the “pigness” of the pig, the “dogness” of the dog.

Aristotle recognized that different animals evidenced different ways of fulfilling the fundamental nature of living things, such as nutrition, locomotion, sensation, cognition, and reproduction. How an animal fulfills these functions is what constitutes its nature. Secondary school biology is still studied in the Aristotelian way. There is nothing mystical about telos ; it is simply what common sense recognizes as “fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.” The only departure that must be made from Aristotle today is to see teloi not as fixed and immutable, but as slices or snapshots of a dynamic process of evolution, genetically encoded and environmentally expressed.

An example from coyote behavior strikingly illustrates how telos needs can trump even major physical pain. It has been recounted for years that coyotes, caught in a leg-hold trap, will chew their legs off, enduring terrible pain, rather than submit to immobility. (This is also true for other animals, such as raccoons.) This is understandable given the coyote’s telos as a free-ranging predator (or, on occasion, prey). It is not plausible to suggest that the animal chews its leg off to avoid death, since it is not possible that a nonlinguistic being has a concept of death, though it understands the inability to escape. Clearly, the animal is not chewing the leg in order to escape the pain, as any attempt to chew the leg off will greatly increase the pain.

Novelty of any sort evokes stress in most if not all animal teloi . Researchers know that animals can be trained by reward to willingly accept some physically painful experimental procedures. In one instance, a friend of mine was drawing blood from dogs daily for a vaccine study. She would enter the facility, play with each dog, draw the blood, and then give the dog a treat. On one occasion, one of the dogs set up such a howl as she was leaving that she raced back to see if his paw was caught in the cage door. It turned out she had forgotten to draw blood from that dog, and he had missed his play and his treat, which bothered him more than the blood draw. Such examples illustrate three major points:

• Pain, as a physical phenomenon, does not begin to capture all the ways that what we do to animals matters to them.
• Other things we do to animals can be worse for them than physical pain. Unfortunately, we have no words for many of the myriad ways we can harm or cause animals to suffer.
• In general, interfering with or impeding actualization of telos creates a negative experiential state for an animal.

In sum, and in spite of the laws, the animal research community has been remiss in failing to address all three levels of ethical concern emerging from animal research. It is unlikely that society will force researchers to address the first level—namely, whether there is any moral justification for using animals in research. Restricting invasive animal use to what is patently beneficial will probably evolve in time, but very slowly, since such an evolution will depend in part on the creation of nonanimal alternatives. But the third level of ethical concern—providing animals with the best possible living conditions compatible with their natures and eliminating negative conditions—is currently practicable. Attention not only to physical needs and control of physical pain, but also to accommodating animal telos in a manner that eliminates all forms of “negative mattering” for the animals and provides occasions for “positive mattering”—what we may call “animal happiness”—can go a long way toward making animal research a moral science . Inevitably, a research environment that makes the life of an animal used in research a pleasant one can do a great deal to counterbalance the issues that arise from invasive animal use.

Bernard E. Rollin is university distinguished professor, professor of philosophy, professor of animal sciences, professor of biomedical sciences, and university bioethicist at Colorado State University. His scholarly interests include both traditional philosophy and applied philosophy. In addition to numerous articles in the history of philosophy, philosophy of language, ethics, and bioethics, he has written many books, including, most recently, Science and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Putting the Horse Before Descartes (Temple University Press, 2011). He has also edited, with M. Lynne Kesel, the two-volume The Experimental Animal in Biomedical Research (CRC Press, 1990 and 1995). He is one of the leading scholars in animal rights and animal consciousness and has lectured over 1,500 times all over the world.

• 1. B.E. Rollin, “The Regulation of Animal Research and the Emergence of Animal Ethics: A Conceptual History,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics , 27 (2006): 285-304. ↵
• 2. B.E. Rollin, Science and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). ↵
• 3. P. West, “Director Addresses Health Research,” The State News, February 27, 1989. ↵
• 4. This was in fact communicated to me in a private conversation by one of the members of the Tuskegee research team. The Nazis presupposed such a principle in their research on unwilling subjects. ↵
• 5. B.E. Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (New York: Prometheus Books, 1992), 141-46 and 149-51; T. Hartung, “Toxicology for the Twenty-First Century,” Nature 460 (2009): 208-212. ↵

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News Release

• Jul 27, 2018

Public Strongly Favors Ending Animal Use for Medical Training, New Survey Finds

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WASHINGTON—As time goes on, the number of people favoring an end to the use of animals in laboratories continues to grow. New survey results published in Alternatives to Laboratory Animals offer new insight into public perceptions in the United States of laboratory animal use, specifically for the purposes of medical training.

When asked if, where available, nonanimal methods should be used over live animals to train medical students and physicians, emergency physicians and paramedics, and pediatricians, 82 to 83 percent of 1011 survey participants agreed. Most respondents (84 percent) agreed that they would want their own doctor to be trained using methods that replicate human anatomy instead of using live animals. More than 66 percent of respondents even agreed that it is “morally wrong or unethical” to use live animals if effective nonanimal methods are available.

With effective nonanimal training methods already widely available, these findings suggest that a considerable majority of the public would like to see an end to the use of animals in medical training. 

“Experts have known for decades that animal use is a poor substitute for human-specific methods when  learning about treating humans, but it can take time for the public to learn about and come to trust new ways of doing things,” says one of the report authors, John Pippin, M.D., F.A.C.C., director of academic affairs at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C., “Having the public’s encouragement to move forward and strive for progress benefits the sciences, which often rely on public support or approval.”

In 1994, the majority of medical school curricula in the United States included live animal laboratory exercises. But the practice steadily declined, and after 2005 that decline accelerated with the Physicians Committee's efforts. In 2016, the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga, the last medical school to use animals to train medical students, ended its animal use and switched to human-relevant methods.

Animals are still used in a small minority of advanced medical training programs, such as emergency medicine residencies or advanced trauma life support (ATLS) courses, but as programs adopt new technologies, animal use continues to fall by the wayside. In 2017, the last pediatrics residency program in the United States or Canada known to use live animals discontinued its use of piglets. That was at Laval University in Québec City.   

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Founded in 1985, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is a nonprofit organization that promotes preventive medicine, conducts clinical research, and encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in education and research.

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• > Journals
• > Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics
• > Volume 31 Issue 1
• > Animal Research that Respects Animal Rights: Extending...

Article contents

Introduction, the rights of animals, requirements for ethical research with humans, extending research requirements for humans to animals, animal research that respects animal rights: extending requirements for research with humans to animals.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2022

The purpose of this article is to show that animal rights are not necessarily at odds with the use of animals for research. If animals hold basic moral rights similar to those of humans, then we should consequently extend the ethical requirements guiding research with humans to research with animals. The article spells out how this can be done in practice by applying the seven requirements for ethical research with humans proposed by Ezekiel Emanuel, David Wendler, and Christine Grady to animal research. These requirements are (1) social value, (2) scientific validity, (3) independent review, (4) fair subject selection, (5) favorable risk–benefit ratio, (6) informed consent, and (7) respect for research subjects. In practice, this means that we must reform the practice of animal research to make it more similar to research with humans, rather than completely abolish the former. Indeed, if we ban animal research altogether, then we would also deprive animals of its potential benefits—which would be ethically problematic.

The ethics of animal experimentation is a controversial topic, currently receiving much attention from both animal researchers and bioethicists. Some argue that animal research is permissible if currently implemented research requirements are met and the research protocol is approved by an independent animal ethics committee (AEC; sometimes also called Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee—IACUC). Others, especially defenders of animal rights such as Tom Regan and Alasdair Cochrane, defend the view that harmful animal research is immoral and should be abolished. However, both philosophers admit that nonharmful animal experimentation may be ethically justified. For example, Regan states that “[t]he rights view is not against research on animals, if this research does not harm these animals or put them at risk of harm.” Footnote 1 And Cochrane claims that “[a]s such, animals have no moral right not to be used for certain purposes if their well-being is respected, and that includes their use in experimentation. If scientists experiment on animals in ways that cause no pain and that do not end in death, then such experiments are permissible.” Footnote 2 However, neither Regan nor Cochrane flesh out what animal research that respects animal rights would be in practice.

This article aims to close this gap in the animal rights literature by arguing that if animals have the same moral worth as humans, along with inviolable rights, then ethical research requirements and principles regulating research with humans should be extended to them as well. Indeed, research with humans—even with groups who cannot speak for themselves—is permitted, so long as some basic requirements are met. If groups unable to consent to their participation in studies were entirely excluded from research, they could not gain from its potentially beneficial discoveries. The same holds for nonhuman animals: research with them should not be condemned outright, but rather conducted in a different way—viz., so that they can also potentially benefit from research results.

To be sure, there is controversy about the standards required for ethical research with humans. In order to make my argument, I rely on the list of requirements that all research with humans must meet presented by Ezekiel Emanuel, David Wendler, and Christine Grady. In their article “What Makes Clinical Research Ethical?,” they list seven requirements, including (1) social value, (2) scientific validity, (3) independent review, (4) fair subject selection, (5) favorable risk–benefit ratio, (6) informed consent, and (7) respect for research subjects. Footnote 3 I outline how these requirements can be applied to the case of animal research in practice; and argue that if animals have basic rights, then much higher research standards than the ones currently implemented have to be met in order for animal research to become ethically legitimate.

The thesis defended here—standards implemented for research with humans should be extended and applied to animals—is not entirely new (see, e.g., Hope Ferdoswian and Chong Choe). Footnote 4 Over the last 15 years, many authors have advocated extending the principles and requirements used in research with humans to animals. However, most authors have respectively focused on a single research requirement, such as respect for autonomy, Footnote 5 , Footnote 6 harm–benefit ratio, Footnote 7 , Footnote 8 respect, Footnote 9 or vulnerability. Footnote 10 , Footnote 11 The aim is to present a more complete picture here.

Two recent publications present more comprehensive accounts of the research principles for animal research. In their article, “A Belmont Report for Animals,” Hope Ferwodsian, Syd L. Johnson, Jane Johnson, Andrew Fenton, Adam Shriver, and John Gluck argue that the key ethical principles of the Belmont Report—that is, respect for persons and their autonomy, beneficence, justice, and special protection for vulnerable individuals and populations—should be binding for animal research. Footnote 12 The authors call for an internationally binding document for animal research invoking these principles. Their project is important and laudable, and I agree with most of their conclusions. However, by focusing on the research requirements proposed in the Belmont Report, they leave aside some elements that are constitutive of ethical animal research. Their account should thus be complemented and refined with further principles.

Tom Beauchamp and David DeGrazia recently presented a more detailed account of ethical principles for animal research. Footnote 13 In their book, Principles of Animal Research Ethics , they outline six moral principles that should govern animal research—three related to social benefit and three related to animal welfare:

1) the principle of no alternative method;

2) the principle of expected net benefit;

3) the principle of sufficient value to justify harm;

4) the principle of no unnecessary harm;

5) the principle of basic needs; and

6) the principle of an upper limit to harm.

Beauchamp and DeGrazia claim that these principles “can be accepted by all parties who are enthusiastic about the history and promise of animal research and all parties who are enthusiastic about vigorous protection of animal research subjects’ welfare—without sacrifice of anyone’s basic commitments.” Footnote 14 That is, they seek a compromise between proponents of animal research and those wanting to protect animal welfare, limiting their framework to those values that most people are likely to endorse. Footnote 15 Thus, their strategy is to propose principles on which animal research proponents and defenders of the animal cause can converge, with a view to forging a pragmatic compromise that will substantially improve animal research. The upshot is that they provide a rather pragmatic framework for ethical animal research, but are not concerned with the question of what ethical research would look like if animals had fundamental rights.

As a result, there is still no full and detailed account that fleshes out what animal research should look like if animals have fundamental rights. Accordingly, the aim here is to outline the principles that should govern animal research if we accept the premise that animals have basic rights. Footnote 16

The argument proceeds as follows: First, I discuss the fundamental rights of animals. Since the claim of this paper is a conditional one—viz., if animals have moral rights, then the ethical requirements, standards, and principles governing research with humans should be applied to animal research—a clear understanding of animals’ rights is needed. If animals have, for example, a right to live or a right to bodily integrity, this will influence what researchers are allowed to do with them. That is, the rights of animals are listed that should be taken into consideration when conducting research. Second, the standards guiding research with humans are examined, thereby relying on the requirements outlined by Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady. Lastly, it is shown how their seven requirements can be applied to animal research in practice, and it is outlined what this would mean for the future of animal experimentation.

In the last 40 years, many animal ethicists have argued that not only do animals matter morally, but they also have the same inherent worth or moral status as humans. This proposition was often advanced by rejecting speciesism. The term “speciesism” was originally introduced by Richard Ryder and taken up by Peter Singer, who presented the first detailed analysis in Animal Liberation : “Speciesism—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” Footnote 17 That is, speciesist behavior entails “an unjustified disadvantageous consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to one or more particular species.” Footnote 18 Correspondingly, antispeciesists claim that a discrimination based merely on species membership is morally problematic, as species membership is morally irrelevant. Thus, if one aims for a non-speciesist treatment of animals, one has to consider these beings, their interests, and their rights in an unbiased way.

In what follows, I do not argue in favor of animal rights per se. For the sake of the argument, I start from the premise that animals have inviolable moral rights, similar to humans’. The aims in what follows are threefold: first, to show that if animals have rights, then a complete halt to animal research is unnecessary; second, to specify the fundamental rights of animals that are relevant to animal research; and third, to adumbrate what animal research could look like if we were to take animals’ rights seriously.

A useful starting-point to determine animals’ rights are the “Five Freedoms of Animal Welfare” developed by the United Kingdom Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC) in 1979. They include:

1) Freedom from hunger and thirst—by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigor.

2) Freedom from discomfort—by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area.

3) Freedom from pain, injury, or disease—by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment.

4) Freedom to express normal behavior—by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind.

5) Freedom from fear and distress—by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering. Footnote 19

These Five Freedoms can be deemed individually necessary and jointly sufficient as a framework for the analysis of animal welfare. If all these requirements are fulfilled, this should lead to a high overall level of animal welfare. Footnote 20

Furthermore, the Five Freedoms can be rephrased as rights. This presupposes that the Five Freedoms involve corresponding duties, which does seem to be the case: farmers are required to respect the Five Freedoms and thus their animals’ basic needs. Footnote 21 Likewise, Clare McCausland has argued that the Five Freedoms can be regarded as welfare rights. Footnote 22 Steven McCulloch concludes: “Taken together, FAWC’s mixed ethical approach, together with the correlative nature of rights and duties, suggests that FAWC’s prescription is very close to a recommendation of moral rights for farm animals.” Footnote 23 Accordingly, animals can hold rights commensurate with their welfare interests covered by the Five Freedoms.

Although the Five Freedoms were originally developed for farmers and animal husbandry, they can also be applied to animal research—implying that researchers have a duty to respect the Five Freedoms. Research animals depend exclusively on laboratory staff members for meeting their basic needs, which results in claims for the provision of food and entertainment possibilities. That is, research animals have the right to live free from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain, distress, and so forth, and they have the right to pursue species-typical behavior. In practice, this means that laboratory stuff and researchers must provide animals with enough space, companionship (where indicated) and possibilities for entertainment, to ensure their physical and mental well-being.

One aspect neglected by the Five Freedoms is animals’ deaths. Most currently implemented animal research guidelines are concerned with minimizing animal suffering, and animals’ deaths before, during, and after experiments is less frequently discussed as an ethical issue. However, according to many animal ethicists, not only animals’ welfare, but also their deaths matter morally. Death forecloses future opportunities for the satisfaction of interests and is thus a harm (by deprivation) to sentient animals. That is, although most sentient animals do not have a concept of death (similarly to infants or severely cognitively disabled humans), their life has a value for them: they have an interest in continued existence, insofar as it allows them to live through future pleasant experiences. Footnote 24 , Footnote 25 , Footnote 26 , Footnote 27 Moral agents have thus a pro tanto duty not to end animals’ lives unnecessarily and prematurely. Therefore, we can add the freedom to continue living one’s life to the list of the Five Freedoms.

If we phrase these freedoms in terms of rights, this leads us to the following list:

1) Right to be free from hunger and thirst;

2) Right to be free from discomfort;

3) Right to be free from pain, injury, or disease;

4) Right to be free to express normal behavior;

5) Right to be free from fear and distress;

6) Right to continued existence.

If one accepts that animals have these rights, there are consequences for their permissible use in medical research. However, as will be argued in what follows, these rights do not imply that research with animals is always ethically problematic. Many human research subjects find themselves in situations similar to those of research animals. For example, they live in extreme dependency on others (as in the case of prisoners or small children), or they are unable to understand what medical research is so as to consent to it (like severely mentally handicapped individuals or infants). Nevertheless, research with them is not categorically forbidden. Rather, if special protective measures are taken and certain rules are respected, research with them may be ethically permissible. This allows them, in turn, to profit from the potential scientific benefits of the studies in which they are involved. The same principle should apply to research with animals.

The objective of medical research is to promote society’s interest in health, knowledge, and well-being at large. In order to avoid the exploitation of research participants in the pursuit of these aims, protective ethical requirements for research have been put in place. These research requirements should be sensitive to humans’ basic rights , such as our right to bodily integrity and our right to respectful treatment. Furthermore, medical research should not override individuals’ basic rights for the sake of the majority.

In addition, some requirements in place for studies on humans are concerned with the form of the research, rather than the basic rights of the enrolled participants. Scientific validity is an example: research that does not meet this requirement is void, as the results are useless from a scientific perspective. The same applies to independent review by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). IRBs ensure that the study pursues an important aim, that the methodology is sound, and that research participants are chosen fairly (not due to their membership of a socially salient group, for example). Thus, research should be governed by the principles of justice and impartiality.

After examining different research guidelines and medical research codes, Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady list seven requirements that should guide all research with humans:

1) social value;

2) scientific validity;

3) independent review;

4) fair subject selection;

5) favorable risk–benefit ratio;

6) informed consent; and

7) respect for research subjects. Footnote 28

In other words, research should be socially or scientifically useful , address important societal and scientific questions, and yield valuable results for society as a whole. The results should be methodologically, statistically, and scientifically sound; that is, accepted scientific principles and methods should be used in order to produce reliable and valid results. Furthermore, the results should be described in a comprehensible way that allows for the study to be replicated. Independent review requires that the study protocol be reviewed and approved by an independent committee charged with investigating whether the study addresses a scientifically important question and is thus indispensable. It also determines whether the study’s design is suitable for achieving the study’s aims and whether the risk–benefit ratio is justified. Fair subject selection demands that justice prevail when choosing the group with which research is conducted. For example, vulnerable or stigmatized groups should not be targeted for high-risk research if the research could also be conducted with other groups. That is, researchers should choose the research participants based on the study’s goals—not simply because of the greater convenience or availability of certain individuals who are willing to take high risks (e.g., due to terminal disease or poverty). Favorable risk–benefit ratio requires a just distribution of burdens and benefits: risks should be minimized and be in proportion to the expected benefits of the study (for the individual concerned and for society at large). Informed consent requires that research subjects be aware that they are participating in a study, that they understand the concomitant risks, and that they consent to their participation only after having been given all relevant information. If research subjects cannot consent due to the nature of the study (e.g., patients in emergency rooms or in a coma) or because they lack the relevant cognitive capacities for giving informed consent, then consent by proxy in the participants’ best interest or in accordance with the presumed values of the individual is required. Furthermore, the risk should be minimized to an acceptable level in such cases. Finally, respect for research subjects means that participants are permitted to withdraw from the study at any time, that their privacy is protected by confidentiality, that they are informed of newly discovered risks, benefits and the study’s results, and that their welfare is maintained throughout the study. In the following, I argue that these same requirements should be extended to research animals, and I show how this can be done in practice.

If we want to respect the rights of animals outlined above—e.g., to be free from discomfort, disease, fear, distress and pain, to express normal behavior, and to enjoy continued existence—this precondition restricts what we are consequently allowed to do with them in research. Inducing diseases in animals, for example, would no longer be permissible. Experiments that cause suffering or lead to the death of the animals would be ethically problematic. And so would experiments that severely restrict animals’ opportunity to pursue species-typical behavior, such as maternal deprivation studies.

However, these restrictions do not rule out other forms of nonharmful animal research. Animals cannot speak up for themselves and give informed consent to their participation in medical research, as they lack the requisite cognitive capacities. For this reason, they share similarities with many groups who cannot consent to research, such as infants, persons in a coma or severely cognitively disabled individuals. On the other hand, these groups should not necessarily be excluded from research, since this would deprive them of all the potential benefits that the research could bring to them. Footnote 29 Indeed, we already permit research that involves little or no risk and that is not harmful with groups unable to consent, so long as there is consent by proxy in their best interest. If animals have basic rights similar to those of humans, then the same principle should apply to them: nonharmful and low-risk research with them should be permissible, since a complete abolition of animal research would deprive animals of research results that are beneficial to them individually, or to their species.

Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady lay out ethical research requirements for studies with diverse populations, including vulnerable groups. If animals have rights similar to humans’, then we have good reasons to extend these requirements to research animals. Here, I outline how this can be done in practice. Note that three conditions are already required for animal research in most countries, namely social and scientific value, scientific validity, and independent review. Footnote 30 While necessary, these requirements are insufficient for ethical animal research. Further elements are needed that (i) guarantee animals’ welfare throughout studies and (ii) provide formal requirements for any research with sentient beings, regardless of species.

Social Value

Let us turn first to social and scientific value. As in the case of research with humans, research with animals should only be conducted if it addresses important societal and scientific questions, yields valuable results for society at large, generates new knowledge, or replicates previous results. Most animal research studies start from the assumption that the expected value should only or primarily benefit humans. However, if animals have fundamental rights, this is problematic: if studies are pursued on and with animals, then the benefits should also be useful to individual animals or their species, not solely to humans. If animal research is solely responsive to humans’ health priorities, then animals carry the undue burden of being used in research from which they do not benefit, which is speciesist. Yet many domesticated animals form part of our society, as humans live with them and benefit from inter-species relationships. Correspondingly, these animals’ interests and health priorities should also be considered in the common good. In practice, this means that when establishing research protocols, the beneficiaries of the study’s results must be identified. If they are solely a small and already over-represented group, or if the research does not address any health priority of a large group, then the study’s aims and the allocation of resources to this end should be reconsidered.

A problem concerning social and scientific values arises due to the lack of obligatory registries for past and ongoing animal experiments, as is required for research with humans. Often, negative results from animal research are not published. This may lead some research groups to undertake studies that were already conducted by other colleagues, but not published. That is, some of the studies conducted on animals fail to generate new knowledge. Although some administrative and practical difficulties would have to be surmounted to establish such registries, Footnote 31 they may be useful for preventing the multiplication of already-conducted experiments which did not result in any new knowledge. That is, such publicly accessible registries could reduce publication bias. Footnote 32 , Footnote 33 , Footnote 34 , Footnote 35

Scientific Validity

Scientific validity is commonly accepted as an important requirement for animal research—not only for scientific reasons, but also for ethical ones:

[…] if poorly conducted studies produce unreliable findings, any suffering endured by animals loses its moral justification because their use cannot possibly contribute towards clinical benefit. Non-publication of animal studies is similarly unethical because the animals involved cannot contribute towards the accumulation of knowledge and because non-publication may result in further, unnecessary animal and human experiments. Footnote 36

That is, a sufficient number of animals should be enrolled in the study to yield reliable and statistically sound results; in the published articles, experiments need to be described in a comprehensible way, enabling other researchers to replicate the study. This presupposes a detailed description of the experiments—including the sex, age, and health-status of the animals involved, along with the method and details of the statistical analysis. To avoid confirmation bias, the studies should be blinded and randomized.

The requirement of scientific validity is not always perfectly respected—in research with humans and with animals—which is why some researchers talk about a “crisis of reproducibility” in many fields, including animal research. Footnote 37 , Footnote 38 , Footnote 39 If research with animals is conducted, it should be ensured by the researchers, AECs, and journal editors that the methods and statistical analysis are well described and sound. For example, this can be done by offering researchers better training about methods and potential biases, as well as by making it obligatory for all articles accepted for publication and involving animal research to follow the ARRIVE [Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments] guidelines for reporting animal research. Footnote 40

Independent Review

A further requirement for research with humans is independent review by IRBs. This is also an established requirement for animal research in most countries. AECs evaluate study protocols and decide whether the research should be approved. However, there are several issues with the evaluation processes for animal research. First, AECs are not yet obligatory in all countries. Second, AECs do not necessarily consist of independent evaluators, as required for IRBs. For example, in the United States, many AECs may be biased because they consist of animal researchers and veterinarians who themselves undertake animal research and thus depend on it for their own research Footnote 41 ; in consequence, they may not be impartial in their evaluations. Third, different AECs often apply divergent standards when it comes to approving the very same studies. Footnote 42 Fourth, AECs frequently do not follow international guidelines, but national ones; hence, approval by an AEC in one country may imply very different protection standards than in another. Finally, there is evidence that the reporting of methods in research protocols is often insufficient, but nevertheless approved by AECs due to implicit confidence rather than to evidence of scientific rigor. Footnote 43

However, this does not mean that AECs are problematic per se and should be abandoned. Rather, they should be reformed. Both AECs and IRBs fulfill the important role of evaluating studies’ aims and methods as well as approving the involved research populations. In order to adequately fulfill this role, AECs need clearer criteria for ethical animal research. That is, binding international guidelines for ethically acceptable research with animals should be established—as is already the case for research with humans. Such guidelines would make the evaluation process less arbitrary. Furthermore, AEC members should be completely independent of the research institution in order not to be unduly influenced or biased, and it should be ensured that at least one trained ethicist is involved in the evaluation process. Footnote 44 Finally, if animals have fundamental rights, then AECs should consider these in a nonspeciesist way. This argument is further developed in the next section.

Fair Subject Selection

Currently, animals are exposed to more of research’s risks than humans, while not expecting any of its benefits for themselves. As Chong Choe Smith writes: “[…] nonhuman animals bear a disproportionate share of the burdens of research without a showing of sufficient justification—for example, a showing that there are morally relevant and significant differences to justify the ethical use of nonhuman animals in research.” Footnote 45 This may especially concern animal species we know little about. A lack of knowledge about some species’ needs or capacity to suffer (e.g., insects) may lead to their interests’ being summarily discarded or simply ignored. Researchers may be tempted to use these animals more often or in high-risk research which supposedly does not afflict this group, thereby placing an unduly heavy burden on them.

The same applies to research that is inconsistently regulated, or not at all. Some species (such as rats, mice, fish, birds, or amphibians) are not always covered by animal welfare regulations in certain countries (e.g., the United States). However, since animals of the same species presumably do not differ regarding their experiential welfare, international guidelines should protect the interests of all animals of the same species in similar ways all around the world. That is, binding international guidelines for ethical animal research are needed—ones that require similar standards for the same species of sentient animals, regardless of where the research is being conducted. Having such internationally recognized, clear-cut criteria for ethical animal research would, in turn, also simplify the evaluation process for AECs.

In principle, researchers should always choose the best model for their research. In practice, however, some species, such as rodents, may be more frequently sought out for studies because they are easily available and do not demand a huge investment of time and money. However, if they are an inappropriate model for the condition being investigated, or if they are not afflicted by the condition being investigated, then the study should not be conducted with them.

Hence, to avoid overburdening animals in research, it must be ensured that animals are only included in research that serves them individually or their species. That is, AECs would need to keep an eye on the animal population chosen for study purposes, and demand a justification for why a specific species was singled out. In practice, this means that AECs should treat animals in research in ways similar to other society members who cannot express themselves for or against their participation in research, such as persons in a coma, infants, or severely cognitively disabled individuals. In the latter type of cases, IRBs have to check whether enrolling this group is necessary for achieving the study aims, or whether these particular groups were chosen due to mere convenience, for example. The same should apply to research animals, as their situation—dependency and inability to speak out for themselves—is similar to these populations’.

Favorable Risk–Benefit Ratio

We refrain from conducting studies with human research subjects if the harm and risk involved is too high for them—even if the results obtained would be highly beneficial to society at large. Neither do we accept the death of human research subjects as a normal consequence of a study. That is, studies with humans must have a favorable risk–benefit ratio. If animals have fundamental rights, then the same principle should apply to research with them. So far, however, animals often do not benefit from the research undertaken on them: the results obtained usually serve the human species exclusively.

Note, though, that research with humans may sometimes be permissible even if the research subjects themselves do not benefit from it, as long as the results obtained would be useful to the general population. Yet this is only the case if the research participants can consent to the study and are informed about the concomitant risks, or if the risk threshold is low so that participation is permissible without direct consent, that is, if the participants are unable to give informed consent and participation is in their interest. The acceptable risk-threshold in the case of humans unable to give informed consent remains disputed in the literature. Footnote 46 , Footnote 47 Defining a risk-threshold for animals is not the aim here and would be a task for separate project. However, what can be noted is that there should be some upper risk threshold for animal research, as is the case of research with humans:

One way of thinking about problems of upper limits is that if it is not justified to exceed fixed upper levels of pain, suffering, and distress with nonconsenting human subjects in nontherapeutic research, and if animal subjects are relevantly similar to human subjects in the relevant respects, then exceeding the same levels of pain, suffering, and distress would likewise not be justified in the use of animals in research—or at least a justification would be required to show why what is unjustified with human subjects is justified with animal subjects. When human interests and animal interests are relevantly similar and their welfare is contingent on not being constrained, coerced, deprived of basic needs, and placed in pain or terror, it is difficult to see what, if anything, would justify treating the interests of animals as dissimilar to human interests. Footnote 48

Although to date only few guidelines, such as the Preamble 23 of Directive 2010/63/EU prescribe an upper limit and a favorable risk–benefit ratio for animals, Footnote 49 it should become a requirement in all animal research guidelines.

Informed Consent

The extension of informed consent to research animals is quite frequently discussed in the literature. Hope Ferdowsian and Chong Choe, for example, state: “[…] although many animals exhibit intelligence, rationality, and maturity, language barriers prohibit informed consent.” Footnote 50 Holly Kantin and David Wendler talk of “the lack of a common language,” Footnote 51 and Jane Johnson and Neal Barnard mention “communication barriers” Footnote 52 insofar as animals cannot tell us what kind of research environment is appropriate for them. However, these characterizations are misleading, insofar as the requirement of informed consent can never apply to animals: most animals could never possibly fulfill its ascription-conditions. The concept of language barriers suggests that if animals could talk, then the problem would be resolved. But much more than merely language and communication barriers are at stake when giving informed consent—namely, cognitive capacities such as rationality, the ability to know how to act intentionally in one’s best interest in the long term, understanding complex circumstances, and the like. As Richard Healey and Angie Pepper put it: animals are incapable of giving informed consent because they “cannot understand, form, and communicate complex intentions about normative concepts like rights and duties.” Footnote 53 That is, animals cannot waive rights regarding themselves and their bodies and thus authorize others to undertake an otherwise impermissible action (such as administering a drug). Animals are thus incapable of giving informed consent to their participation in medical research.

Nonetheless, there is another understanding of informed consent that could be applied to the case of animal research, namely assent and dissent. Animals have various preferences, which they can express. For example, animals can show—with the help of humans and a trial-and-error system—their food preferences, or, in the case of dogs, which walking route they wish to take with their human guardian. I argued earlier that animals have a basic right to express normal behavior. Part of animals’ normal behavior is their ability to freely pursue their own interests and preferences. To act upon their will—to move freely, to curiously discover a new area or to freely choose with whom they interact—constitutes a significant part of a good life for many animals. That is, many animals can express their will through their actions and in interactions with other beings—and this capacity should be respected. Applied to the case of animal research, this means that animals can show whether they wish to partake in research or not. Thus, there is a way to reformulate the idea of informed consent in research animals:

The fact that investigators are required to solicit the assent and respect the dissent of human subjects who are unable to provide informed consent suggests that animals’ inability to provide informed consent does not provide a justification for failing to take into account their preferences regarding whether they participate in research. Footnote 54

Kantin and Wendler distinguish welfare- and agency-based reasons for why researchers should respect animals’ preferences to withdraw from or participate in research. Preferences can mirror individuals’ welfare, which provides a pro tanto reason to take them into account. Hence, researchers should observe if animals show dissent (e.g., in the form of discomfort or pain), with the aim of maintaining their welfare. Footnote 55 Although it may be difficult to determine the exact source of unease in research animals (since it may also be due to fear, hunger, and the like), paying attention to dissenting behavioral cues can help to determine whether the harm experienced by the research animals exceeds an allowable upper limit, and corresponding measures could be taken to minimize suffering. That is, respect for sustained dissent can minimize the overall harm incurred by research animals.

Agency-based reasons are concerned with respect for individuals’ capacity to freely choose what they prefer, regardless of whether it is beneficial or detrimental to their well-being. Agency has intrinsic value insofar as it matters for forming and shaping one’s life in the way one wishes. This capacity for agency can sometimes be found in some animals (e.g., great apes, dolphins, and possibly elephants). Kantin and Wendler infer from this fact that, “[…] at a minimum, it seems plausible that investigators have an obligation to make sure that no animal to whom agency-based reasons apply has her dissent disrespected on a consistent basis.” Footnote 56 In practice, this means that different methods or analgesia should perhaps be deployed, or that strongly dissenting animals should be excluded from research.

In some cases, it is also possible to extend the principle of assent to research animals, such as when animals can freely choose to join the laboratory of their own will and when it pleases them, for example in the case of behavioral studies. Under animals’ assent, I understand here animals’ approval of what is happening to them. This can manifest itself in the form of animals’ not showing disapproval or resistance, their showing approval to what is happening to them, or their affirmative behavior, such as when they join a study setting deliberately. Footnote 57 An example are chimpanzees in reserves or sanctuaries who participate in studies involving video games which test their cognitive capacities; they engage in this research of their own will, since it presents them with a welcome distraction from their daily life.

In summary, this means that close attention should be paid to the behavior and preferences of individual animals during studies. Researchers should test whether animals show assent to their study participation, and steps should be taken if dissent is perceived. In practice, this implies that many painful experiments conducted on animals would no longer be possible.

Respect for Research Subjects

As their last requirement, Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady list “respect for research subjects.” The first aspect of this criterion involves permitting withdrawal from the research anytime, a point already covered in the previous section on animals’ assent and dissent. Furthermore, Emanuel, Wendler, and Grady mention the need to protect privacy through confidentiality, to provide information about newly discovered risks or benefits, and to inform research subjects of the clinical research’s results. These requirements do not seem relevant to the case of animals. However, there is a fifth requirement that does matter, namely, that researchers maintain the welfare of their research subjects. This can be described as beneficence. Current research practices often fall short of this requirement. For example, it is a common practice to induce harmful conditions and diseases in animals (such as cancer or lameness)—a practice we should never accept in the case of humans. If animals have a right to remain free of disease and to benefit from bodily integrity, then the same protection should apply to their case: causing them deliberately harmful conditions (such as, e.g., cancer) would be morally impermissible.

This leads us to consider another problematic practice, namely bringing animals into existence merely to serve research purposes. Many animals are bred for research, and they will normally spend their whole lives in research settings, afflicted by disease or other painful conditions while being used in harmful experiments until they die. These animals are not brought into existence for their own sake; rather, they are exclusively bred as means to the end of the research, and usually they will experience a rather low quality of life. If animals have basic rights, such pure instrumentalization is morally problematic. We usually think that it is morally reprehensible to bring children into existence solely as mere means to an end, such as serving their parents. The same should hold for research animals, if they have basic moral rights. As Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka note regarding companion animals: “Humans may bring dogs into their lives for pleasure (and company, love, and inspiration), but this is compatible with dogs existing in and for themselves) as it is in the case of humans.” Footnote 58 In practice, humans can still bring domesticated animals into existence, but these animals always have to be valued for themselves: they cannot exclusively be bred for the purpose of animal research alone, being deliberately infected with diseases or having other harmful conditions inflicted upon them. This means that nonharmful or minimally invasive research with already-existing sick animals may be ethically permissible, as long as it is in the interest of these animals to participate in a given study.

Lastly, respect for animals also means that their right to life must be respected: laboratory animals should not automatically be put to death once the study ends, unless unavoidable suffering or pain due to natural causes makes euthanasia necessary. Rather, steps should be taken to allow these animals a fulfilled life in sanctuaries or homes. That is, animals should only be put to death if it is in their own best interest and unavoidable for reducing suffering that cannot be alleviated otherwise. Footnote 59 A possible option is to rehome animals once a study is finished, that is, to find caretakers or sanctuaries for animals used in research Footnote 60 —a practice already suggested for some species by the European Directive on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes. Footnote 61

In this article, I have defended the view that if animals have moral rights, then animal research should not necessarily be abolished, but should rather be completely reformed by modeling it on ethical research with humans. If we entirely excluded animals from research, then we would deprive them of potential benefits to them or their species. Taking the Five Freedoms as a basis, I fleshed out animals’ basic rights and argued that requirements already in place for ethical research with humans should be extended to animal research. If research with humans who cannot speak up for themselves and consent to their participation in studies may be conducted as long as some requirements are met and the risk-level is low, I contended, then the same conditions should apply to animals’ involvement in research. Moreover, I outlined how this can best be done in practice, by assessing how the requirements of social and scientific value, scientific validity, independent review, fair subject-selection, harm–benefit ratio, informed consent, and respect could be applied to animal research.

Given all these considerations, it appears that only noninvasive animal research, some behavioral studies where animals are merely observed, practices involving little or no harm and stress, and the use of the animals after their natural death are ethically permissible. Further cases of admissible research include: “the disease or condition being investigated is one that naturally occurs in the study animal; the animal enrolled in the experiment is already afflicted with that disease or condition; and participation in the research offers the chance of benefit (or no more than minimal risk) to the individual participant.” Footnote 62

Note that the list of rights and research requirements presented here is a rather basic one. That is, the rights and requirements presented form a minimal threshold for ethically acceptable animal research. Other, complementary principles may be added to this list, such as protections for particularly vulnerable groups of animals (e.g., animal species who need special provisions when in research settings due to their specific needs, which may be harder to meet or are more likely to be overlooked). However, the rights and requirements presented here are meant to establish the most basic conditions animal research should meet on the supposition that animals have rights.

To be sure, there may be disagreement about some of the animal rights and requirements I defend in this article. Some people may argue, for example, that the right to continued existence is too demanding, and that animals lack such a right. However, even if I deem the list of requirements presented here jointly necessary for ethical animal research, there remain possible applications of research requirements that are compatible with animals’ deaths. That is, given that we live in a predominantly speciesist world, even the extension of just one of these requirements would already be a step in the right direction. Hence even if one did not accept one or several of the rights or requirements outlined here, then there would nonetheless be other lessons to be learned from the application of the remaining research requirements and rights to the case of animal research.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the participants of the annual conference of the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Basel, as well as the participants of the colloquium in practical philosophy at the University of Berne for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant number 179826).

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• Volume 31, Issue 1
• Angela K. Martin (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180121000499

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• v.8(6); 2007 Jun

The ethics of animal research. Talking Point on the use of animals in scientific research

Simon festing.

1 Simon Festing is Executive Director and Robin Wilkinson is Science Communications Officer at the Research Defence Society in London, UK. ku.gro.ten-sdr@gnitsefs

Robin Wilkinson

Animal research has had a vital role in many scientific and medical advances of the past century and continues to aid our understanding of various diseases. Throughout the world, people enjoy a better quality of life because of these advances, and the subsequent development of new medicines and treatments—all made possible by animal research. However, the use of animals in scientific and medical research has been a subject of heated debate for many years in the UK. Opponents to any kind of animal research—including both animal-rights extremists and anti-vivisectionist groups—believe that animal experimentation is cruel and unnecessary, regardless of its purpose or benefit. There is no middle ground for these groups; they want the immediate and total abolition of all animal research. If they succeed, it would have enormous and severe consequences for scientific research.

No responsible scientist wants to use animals or cause them unnecessary suffering if it can be avoided, and therefore scientists accept controls on the use of animals in research. More generally, the bioscience community accepts that animals should be used for research only within an ethical framework.

The UK has gone further than any other country to write such an ethical framework into law by implementing the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. It exceeds the requirements in the European Union's Directive 86/609/EEC on the protection of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes, which is now undergoing revision ( Matthiessen et al , 2003 ). The Act requires that proposals for research involving the use of animals must be fully assessed in terms of any harm to the animals. This involves detailed examination of the particular procedures and experiments, and the numbers and types of animal used. These are then weighed against the potential benefits of the project. This cost–benefit analysis is almost unique to UK animal research legislation; only German law has a similar requirement.

The UK has gone further than any other country to write such an ethical framework into law by implementing the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986

In addition, the UK government introduced in 1998 further ‘local' controls—that is, an Ethical Review Process at research institutions—which promote good animal welfare and humane science by ensuring that the use of animals at the designated establishment is justified. The aims of this additional review process are: to provide independent ethical advice, particularly with respect to applications for project licences, and standards of animal care and welfare; to provide support to licensees regarding animal welfare and ethical issues; and to promote ethical analysis to increase awareness of animal welfare issues and to develop initiatives for the widest possible application of the 3Rs—replacement, reduction and refinement of the use of animals in research ( Russell & Burch, 1959 ). In practice, there has been concern that the Ethical Review Process adds a level of bureaucracy that is not in proportion to its contribution to improving animal welfare or furthering the 3Rs.

Thanks to some extensive opinion polls by MORI (1999a , 2002 , 2005 ), and subsequent polls by YouGov (2006) and ICM (2006) , we now have a good understanding of the public's attitudes towards animal research. Although society views animal research as an ethical dilemma, polls show that a high proportion—84% in 1999, 90% in 2002 and 89% in 2005—is ready to accept the use of animals in medical research if the research is for serious medical purposes, suffering is minimized and/or alternatives are fully considered. When asked which factors should be taken into account in the regulatory system, people chose those that—unknown to them—are already part of the UK legislation. In general, they feel that animal welfare should be weighed against health benefits, that cosmetic-testing should not be allowed, that there should be supervision to ensure high standards of welfare, that animals should be used only if there is no alternative, and that spot-checks should be carried out. It is clear that the UK public would widely support the existing regulatory system if they knew more about it.

It is clear that the UK public would widely support the existing regulatory system if they knew more about it

GP Net also asked whether GPs agreed that “medical research data can be misleading”; 93% agreed. This result puts into context the results from another poll of GPs in 2004. Europeans for Medical Progress (EMP; London, UK), an anti-vivisection group, found that 82% had a “concern […] that animal data can be misleading when applied to humans” ( EMP, 2004) . In fact, it seems that most GPs think that medical research in general can be misleading; it is good scientific practice to maintain a healthy degree of scepticism and avoid over-reliance on any one set of data or research method.

Another law, which enables people to get more information, might also help to influence public attitudes towards animal research. The UK Freedom of Information (FOI) Act came into full force on 1 January 2005. Under the Act, anybody can request information from a public body in England, Wales or Northern Ireland. Public bodies include government departments, universities and some funding bodies such as the research councils. The FOI Act is intended to promote openness and accountability, and to facilitate better public understanding of how public authorities carry out their duties, why and how they make decisions, and how they spend public money. There are two ways in which information can be made available to the public: some information will be automatically published and some will be released in response to individual requests. The FOI Act is retrospective so it applies to all information, regardless of when it was created.

In response to the FOI Act, the Home Office now publishes overviews of all new animal research projects, in the form of anonymous project licence summaries, on a dedicated website. This means that the UK now provides more public information about animal research than any other country. The Research Defence Society (RDS; London, UK), an organization representing doctors and scientists in the debate on the use of animals in research and testing, welcomes the greater openness that the FOI Act brings to discussions about animal research. With more and reliable information about how and why animals are used, people should be in a better position to debate the issues. However, there are concerns that extremist groups will try to obtain personal details and information that can identify researchers, and use it to target individuals.

As a House of Lords Select Committee report in July 2002 stated, “The availability to the public of regularly updated, good quality information on what animal experiments are done and why, is vital to create an atmosphere in which the issue of animal experimentation can be discussed productively” ( House of Lords, 2002 ). Indeed, according to a report on public attitudes to the biological sciences and their oversight, “Having information and perceived honesty and openness are the two key considerations for the public in order for them to have trust in a system of controls and regulations about biological developments” ( MORI, 1999b ).

In the past five years, there have been four major UK independent inquiries into the use of animals in biomedical research: a Select Committee in the House of Lords (2002) ; the Animal Procedures Committee (2003) ; the Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2005) ; and the Weatherall Committee ( Weatherall et al , 2006 ), which specifically examined the use of non-human primates in scientific and medical research. All committees included non-scientists and examined evidence from both sides of the debate. These rigorous independent inquiries all accepted the rationale for the use of animals in research for the benefit of human health, and concluded that animal research can be scientifically validated on a case-by-case basis. The Nuffield Council backed the 3Rs and the need for clear information to support a constructive debate, and further stated that violence and intimidation against researchers or their allies is morally wrong.

Animal research has obviously become a smaller proportion of overall bioscience and medical R&D spending in the UK

In addition, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA; London, UK) has investigated and ruled on 38 complaints made since 1992 about published literature—leaflets and brochures—regarding claims about the validity or otherwise of animal research and the scope of alternative methods. In 34 out of 38 cases, they found against the anti-vivisectionist groups, either supporting complaints about anti-vivisectionist literature, or rejecting the complaints by anti-vivisectionists about the literature from medical organizations. Only four complaints against scientific/medical research literature have been upheld, not because the science was flawed but as a result of either semantics or the ASA judging that the advertisement fell outside the UK remit.

Animal-rights groups also disagree with the 3Rs, since these principles still allow for the use of animals in research; they are only interested in replacement

However, seemingly respectable mainstream groups still peddle dangerously misleading and inaccurate information about the use of animals in research. As previously mentioned, EMP commissioned a survey of GPs that showed that the “majority of GPs now question the scientific worth of animal tests” ( EMP, 2004 ). The raw data is available on the website of EMP's sister group Americans For Medical Advancement (AFMA; Los Angeles, CA, USA; AFMA, 2004 ), but their analysis is so far-fetched that the polling company, TNS Healthcare (London, UK), distanced itself from the conclusions. In a statement to the Coalition for Medical Progress (London, UK)—a group of organizations that support animal research—TNS Healthcare wrote, “The conclusions drawn from this research by AFMA are wholly unsupported by TNS and any research findings or comment published by AFMA is not TNS approved. TNS did not provide any interpretation of the data to the client. TNS did not give permission to the client to publish our data. The data does not support the interpretation made by the client (which in our opinion exaggerates anything that may be found from the data)” ( TNS Healthcare, 2004 ). Nonetheless, EMP has used its analysis to lobby government ministers and misinform the public.

Approximately 2.7 million regulated animal procedures were conducted in 2003 in the UK—half the number performed 30 years ago. The tight controls governing animal experimentation and the widespread implementation of the 3Rs by the scientific community is largely responsible for this downward trend, as recognized recently by then Home Office Minister, Caroline Flint: “…new technologies in developing drugs [have led] to sustained and incremental decreases in some types of animal use over recent years, whilst novel medicines have continued to be produced. This is an achievement of which the scientific community can be rightly proud” ( Flint, 2005 ).

After a period of significant reduction, the number of regulated animal procedures stabilized from 1995 until 2002. Between 2002 and 2005, the use of genetically modified animals—predominantly mice—led to a 1–2% annual increase in the number of animals used ( Home Office, 2005 ). However, between 1995 and 2005, the growth in UK biomedical research far outstripped this incremental increase: combined industry and government research and development (R&D) spending rose by 73% from £2,080 million to £3,605 million ( ABPI, 2007 ; DTI, 2005 ). Animal research has obviously become a smaller proportion of overall bioscience and medical R&D spending in the UK. This shows the commitment of the scientific community to the development and use of replacement and reduction techniques, such as computer modelling and human cell lines. Nevertheless, animal research remains a small, but vital, part of biomedical research—experts estimate it at about 10% of total biomedical R&D spending.

The principles of replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals in scientific research are central to UK regulation. In fact, the government established the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs; London, UK) in May 2004 to promote and develop high-quality research that takes the 3Rs into account. In support of this, then Science Minister Lord Sainsbury announced in 2005 that the Centre would receive an additional £1.5 million in funding over the next three years.

The ultimate aim of the NC3Rs is to substitute a significant proportion of animal research by investigating the development of alternative techniques, such as human studies, and in vitro and in silico studies. RDS supports this aim, but believes that it is unrealistic to expect this to be possible in every area of scientific research in the immediate future. After all, if the technology to develop these alternatives is not available or does not yet exist, progress is likely to be slow. The main obstacle is still the difficulty of accurately mimicking the complex physiological systems of whole living organisms—a challenge that will be hard to meet. There has been some progress recently imitating single organs such as the liver, but these need further refinement to make them suitable models for an entire organ and, even if validated, they cannot represent a whole-body system. New and promising techniques such as microdosing also have the potential to reduce the number of animals used in research, but again cannot replace them entirely.

Anti-vivisectionist groups do not accept this reality and are campaigning vigorously for the adoption of other methods without reference to validation or acceptance of their limitations, or the consequences for human health. Animal-rights groups also disagree with the 3Rs, since these principles still allow for the use of animals in research; they are only interested in replacement. Such an approach would ignore the recommendations of the House of Lords Select Committee report, and would not deal with public concerns about animal welfare. Notwithstanding this, the development of alternatives—which invariably come from the scientific community, rather than anti-vivisection groups—will necessitate the continued use of animals during the research, development and validation stages.

Society should push authorities to quickly adopt successfully validated techniques, while realizing that pushing for adoption without full validation could endanger human health

The scientific community, with particular commitment shown by the pharmaceutical industry, has responded by investing a large amount of money and effort in developing the science and technology to replace animals wherever possible. However, the development of direct replacement technologies for animals is a slow and difficult process. Even in regulatory toxicology, which might seem to be a relatively straightforward task, about 20 different tests are required to assess the risk of any new substance. In addition, introducing a non-animal replacement technique involves not only development of the method, but also its validation by national and international regulatory authorities. These authorities tend to be conservative and can take many years to write a new technique into their guidelines. Even then, some countries might insist that animal tests are carried out if they have not been explicitly written out of the guidelines. Society should push authorities to quickly adopt successfully validated techniques, while realizing that pushing for adoption without full validation could endanger human health.

Despite the inherent limitations of some non-animal tests, they are still useful for pre-screening compounds before the animal-testing stage, which would therefore reduce rather than replace the number of animals used. An example of this is the Ames test, which uses strains of the bacterium Salmonella typhimurium to determine whether chemicals cause mutations in cellular DNA. This and other tests are already widely used as pre-screens to partly replace rodent testing for cancer-causing compounds. Unfortunately, the in vitro tests can produce false results, and tend to be used more to understand the processes of mutagenicity and carcinogenicity than to replace animal assays. However, there are moves to replace the standard mouse carcinogenicity assay with other animal-based tests that cause less suffering because they use fewer animals and do not take as long. This has already been achieved in tests for acute oral toxicity, where the LD50—the median lethal dose of a substance—has largely been replaced by the Fixed Dose Procedure, which was developed, validated and promoted between 1984 and 1989 by a worldwide collaboration, headed by scientists at the British Toxicological Society (Macclesfield, UK).

Although animals cannot yet be completely replaced, it is important that researchers maximize refinement and reduction

Furthermore, cell-culture based tests have considerably reduced the use of rodents in the initial screening of potential new medicines, while speeding up the process so that 10–20 times the number of compounds can be screened in the same period. A leading cancer charity, Yorkshire Cancer Research (Harrogate, UK), funded research into the use of cell cultures to understand better the cellular mechanisms of prostate cancer—allowing researchers to investigate potential therapies using fewer animals.

Microdosing is an exciting new technique for measuring how very small doses of a compound move around the body. In principle, it should be possible to use this method in humans and therefore to reduce the number of animals needed to study new compounds; however, it too has limitations. By its very nature, it cannot predict toxicity or side effects that occur at higher therapeutic doses. It is an unrealistic hope—and a false claim—that microdosing can completely replace the use of animals in scientific research; “animal studies will still be required,” confirmed the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (FRAME; Nottingham, UK; FRAME, 2005 ).

However, as with many other advances in non-animal research, this was never classified as ‘alternatives research'. In general, there is no separate field in biomedical research known as ‘alternatives research'; it is one of the highly desirable outcomes of good scientific research. The claim by anti-vivisection campaigners that research into replacements is neglected merely reflects their ignorance.

Good science and good experimental design also help to reduce the number of animals used in research as they allow scientists to gather data using the minimum number of animals required. However, good science also means that a sufficient number must be used to enable precise statistical analysis and to generate significant results to prevent the repetition of experiments and the consequent need to use more animals. In 1998, FRAME formed a Reduction Committee, in part to publicize effective reduction techniques. The data collected by the Committee so far provides information about the overall reduction in animal usage that has been brought about by the efforts of researchers worldwide ( FRAME Reduction Committee, 2005 ).

For example, screening potential anti-cancer drugs uses the so-called hollow-fibre system, in which tumour cells are grown in a tube-like polymer matrix that is implanted into mice. Drugs are then administered, the tubes removed and the number of cells determined. This system has increased the amount of data that can be obtained per animal in some studies and has therefore reduced the number of mice used ( Double, 2004 ). In neuroscience, techniques such as cooling regions of the brain instead of removing subsections, and magnetic resonance imaging, have both helped to reduce the number of laboratory animals used ( Royal Society, 2004 ).

The benefits of animal research have been enormous and it would have severe consequences for public health and medical research if it were abandoned

Matching the number of animals generated from breeding programmes to the number of animals required for research has also helped to reduce the number of surplus animals. For example, the cryopreservation of sperm and oocytes has reduced the number of genetically modified mice required for breeding programmes ( Robinson et al , 2003 ); mice lines do not have to be continuously bred if they can be regenerated from frozen cells when required.

Although animals cannot yet be completely replaced, it is important that researchers maximize reduction and refinement. Sometimes this is achieved relatively easily by improving animal husbandry and housing, for example, by enriching their environment. These simple measures within the laboratory aim to satisfy the physiological and behavioural needs of the animals and therefore maintain their well-being.

Another important factor is refining the experimental procedures themselves, and refining the management of pain. An assessment of the method of administration, the effects of the substance on the animal, and the amount of handling and restraint required should all be considered. Furthermore, careful handling of the animals, and administration of appropriate anaesthetics and analgesics during the experiment, can help to reduce any pain experienced by the animals. This culture of care is achieved not only through strict regulations but also by ensuring that animal technicians and other workers understand and adopt such regulations. Therefore, adequate training is an important aspect of the refinement of animal research, and should continually be reviewed and improved.

In conclusion, RDS considers that the use of animals in research can be ethically and morally justified. The benefits of animal research have been enormous and it would have severe consequences for public health and medical research if it were abandoned. Nevertheless, the use of the 3Rs is crucial to continuously reduce the number and suffering of animals in research. Furthermore, a good regulatory regime—as found in the UK—can help to reduce further the number of animals used. Therefore, we support a healthy and continued debate on the use of animals in research. We recognize that those who oppose animal experimentation should be free to voice their opinions democratically, and we look forward to constructive discussion in the future with organizations that share the middle ground with us.

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Should Animals Be Used in Medical Research?

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Introduction

No one can negate the fact that medical research is in deed very important in the field of medicine. It generally represents various types of researches like applied, transactional or basic research that are usually carried out with a main aim of supporting knowledge present in the field of medicine.

Conducting medical research may involve use of animals, simulations on computers and experiments conducted with cells as well as other organs and tissues. However, the most common type of research involves use of animals since they have been used for many years. This is due to the fact that some animals are similar to human beings in several ways and therefore they can be used effectively to conduct some of the necessary steps and procedures in medicine.

However, the practice has raised considerable debate about the correctness of using animals for medical research due to moral and ethical implications of the same. Some people feel that use of animals should be banned while others feel that the practice ought to continue. Therefore, this paper shall critically analyze the question whether animals should be used for medical research.

As much as it is a controversial topic, there are many reasons that support the use of animals in medical research. To begin with, benefits that the human fraternity has benefited with due to use of animals in research need no further emphasis. The research has accomplished much in the scientific field since scientists have been using animals to test their theories and alter the same in accordance to the results obtained.

No one can actually stand and declare that they have not benefited from animal research and if not so, people closely related to them may have reaped a lot of benefits from the same. A lot of the vaccines and the antibiotics that are being used currently have resulted from the animal research.

The practice can be termed as a life saver because many lives are saved every day by the practice. Scientists use animals to test new medications as well as new treatment procedures like surgery since many animals are almost like human beings and respond to medicine and other forms treatments in similar ways. It is therefore possible to use animals while testing the dangers and the toxicity of new drugs and by so doing; it is possible to protect human beings from the dangers that can emanate from the use of such drugs.

Anyone who can figure out the dangers of using medicine without testing the reaction of the same cannot possibly oppose the use of animals in medical research. The main reason of the practice is to ensure the safety of human beings in all circumstances which is equally important as preserving life.

Human life is very important and should be preserved at all costs. Medical research not only allows treatment procedures to be carried out, but it also enables researchers to come up with vaccines that are used for prevention purposes. Disease prevention is very important because were it not for vaccines that have been developed, many lives would have been wiped out by the diseases that are present in the world.

A study of history indicates that before current developments in the medical field, some disease outbreaks used to cause death to a very large group of people in a population. That causes big loses in every country as human resource is an important asset of each and every country. In addition, it has been possible to develop vaccines that have helped to eradicate some dangerous diseases like small pox and measles in some countries.

Apart from the innumerable benefits of the practice, animals that are used for the practice are treated with dignity to avoid violating their rights. According to the studies of National Institutes of Health (n. d.), Congress and Public Health Service has contributed greatly to ensure that animals used for research are treated in a humane way.

They have set laws and regulations as well as the necessary policies to safeguard animals. For instance, there is always a guide that stipulates the type of environment that each and every animal requires as well as the type of the care necessary. It therefore does not make much sense to say that use of animals in research is unethical as there are measures which are already established to prevent any unethical treatment (Prate, 2002).

On the other hand, use of animals for medical research is not only hurtful but also not necessary. However, it is important to note that the fact that it is not necessary means that there are other alternatives of conducting medical research and does knot negate the fact that human life is important and should be protected at all costs.

Although the alternatives methods may not give the same results as animal tests, there is a high possibility that with some developments the same can become beneficial and eliminate the trouble of using animals. If more research was carried, cell culture studies and computers can be used effectively although the results may not be as reliable as results of animal studies.

Animals like human beings feel pain and therefore, given that there are a wide range of procedures carried in medical research, they are exposed to so much pain. Although it is possible to minimize pain by use of anesthesia, scientists are always reluctant to do so because they argue that it can interfere with the results.

As much as there are some guidelines that are given to make sure that animals used for testing are treated in a humane way, exposing them to so much pain is the main disadvantage of the practice identified by the animal advocates as studies of Algoe (2010) indicate.

Apart from pain, procedures used in animal research are dangerous and pose great risk to animals. For instance, it is true that, animals are used to test new medicines before they are released in to the market. Some of these medicines end up harming the animals as they may contain dangerous side effects.

On the same note, since animals are used even in testing cosmetics, studies of Algoe (2010) illustrate that rabbits used to test the effects of the cosmetics and other skin products are usually killed after the research. Animals are also used to test the effect of corrosive chemicals and acids. During these painful tests, animals are not given any pain relief for the same reason of avoiding any interference with the results.

Further studies illustrate that the Environmental Protection Agency requires that pesticides be tested first on dogs before they are released in to the market. No one would want to imagine the suffering such animals go through when being forced to inhaled dangerous poisonous chemicals. Various inhuman tests carried out on animals may be beyond the scope of this paper but the truth is, there being other alternatives, there is no reason why animals should be exposed to such cruelty.

According to Algoe (2010), about fifty thousand animals die every year due to problems encountered in the process of medical research. A lot of the researches conducted are a clear indication that even if it is not all procedures in medical research that lead to death, the fact is there are many which claim the life of animals.

For instance, one company that manufactures food for pets kills many more in the process of production while testing the effectiveness of different types of food. All animals are important ranging from dogs, cats, donkeys and rats to mention just a few and ought to be protected and treated with dignity. Bent on that, it is clear why the use of animals in medical research should be banned as it is not morally appropriate.

It is true that human race benefits greatly from the use of animals in the medical research. It is also true that the practice is inappropriate because it harms and kills the animals. Therefore, it is a practice that is beneficial to human beings while being destructive to animals.

It is important to take care of human life and on the other hand, it is still important to ensure the well fare of animals since they are living things and deserve to be treated as such. At this point no one would disagree with the fact that animals should only be used for medical research as the last option. In addition, even at such a point important measures ought to be put in place to prevent any inhuman treatment as well as minimizing the severity of the consequences.

Research conducted indicates that some products like cosmetics and household products need not to be tested on animals since there are other alternatives. Moreover, some people have understood the dangers of animal testing and as a result, some centers like Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to animal Testing have been opened.

It is a center that was opened with a main aim of developing new methods that can replace animal testing. Although it is a costly project because it involves use of new methods and old methods simultaneously to ensure that the results are consistence, various organizations as well as the government should ensure that enough funds are available to help the center achieve its goal and vision of finding alternative means of testing.

As much as possible, it is important to use other methods of testing which are inclusive of in-vitro tests, human clinical tests and the computer software. Human clinical tests make use of human beings to conduct various experiments in a clinical set up.

While used appropriately, the alternative tests can successfully give almost or similar results and by so doing, the life of animals will be saved and also the life of human beings. It is important to point out that some alternatives like the use of animal cells, organs, tissues and other parts are not appropriate because even if they spare the animal a lot of pain, an animal must be killed in order to obtain such internal organs.

If all the alternatives fail to work and the only option is to use animals, then it is necessary to employ appropriate measures to ensure that animals are prevented from much suffering. It is true that anesthesia my interfere with results but what would prevent scientists to undertake research and search for better methods of pain relief that may not interfere with their results.

If it was possible for the same scientists to discover better forms of pain relief to be used while treating human beings, is it also not possible to develop pain reliefs for animals which cannot interfere with other procedures involved? In addition, studies of Prate (2002) illustrate that allowing experimentation does not mean that all tests should be carried out even them that are appropriate.

On the same note, the same study explains that although the researcher was using mice for the study, it was not possible to continue with all the tests since some would have exposed the poor animals to unnecessary stress and pain. It is therefore possible to allow only appropriate tests that cannot cause pain and result to other unfavorable conditions.

It is time the government and other stake holders take the issue of using animals for testing seriously. If there are laws that safeguard animals from maltreatment by other member members of the public, there should be rules and laws to safe guard the animals from being destroyed during medical research.

It does not make any sense to take action against people who kill animals on the roads and at the same times continue to kill more animals in the laboratory. Since animals are not like human beings who can refuse to be tested, it is only the human species that can help solve the problem.

It is not only the authorities that should control unnecessary animal testing but also the general public. For instance, what would happen if all of us refused to buy products that have manufactured by the companies that use animal testing? All of us have a duty and a responsibility of preventing inhumane as well as unnecessary killing of animals.

In conclusion, it is important to mention that the question can be answered differently in different perspectives. For instance, use of utilitarian ethical theories disqualifies the fact that animal research exposes the animal to pain since in such a perspective, the correctness of an action is dependent on the benefits of the same (Paul & Paul, 2001).

Similarly, another person may argue that protesting against killing animals in research is inappropriate because human beings kill animals for other purposes like to obtain meat. Being aware of the perspectives that have been used, this paper has tried not only to use all the perspectives, but also to put together different approaches without being so much focused on any.

Algoe, S. (2010). Animals should not be used for medical experimentation . Web.

National Institutes of Health. (n. d.). Medical Research with Animals . Web.

Paul, E. F., & Paul, J. (2001). Why animal experimentation matters: the use of animals in medical research. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers.

Prate, A. M. (2002). Should animals be used for experimentation ? Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, July 3). Should Animals Be Used in Medical Research? https://ivypanda.com/essays/should-animals-be-used-in-medical-research/

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Should Animals Be Used in Medical Research?" July 3, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/should-animals-be-used-in-medical-research/.

1. IvyPanda . "Should Animals Be Used in Medical Research?" July 3, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/should-animals-be-used-in-medical-research/.

Bibliography

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