Dear Editor,
I was dismayed after reading the article by Blaha and Leon in the July issue1. For the past 40+ years I have been an advocate for animal well-being. For the past 20 years I have used Buprenorphine to alleviate postoperative pain in all species of laboratory animals, and for the past 15 years have used Buprenorphine preemptively to improve pain alleviation in rodents. We have routinely documented the rapid recovery of normal behavior, recovery of presurgery weight, and normal weight gain as compared to nontreated controls in mice and rats undergoing a wide range of surgical procedures, including abdominal implants.
I am the attending veterinarian at three AAALAC-accredited institutions. At all of these institutions, we routinely administer Buprenorphine at the recommended dose of 0.05 to 0.1 mg/kg 30 minutes before surgery and every 8-12 hours after surgery until the animal exhibits normal food consumption and normal behavior. In almost all major, invasive procedures including abdominal implants, animals exhibit normal feeding behavior and regain presurgery weight within 48 hours.
The editorial board should be embarrassed about publishing a paper that did not give analgesic at the proper dose rate or at intervals to assure postoperative analgesia (i.e., the authors gave Buprenorphine at an extremely high dose rate and failed to give the analgesic at appropriate intervals to assure analgesia).
I hope you will take steps to assure your reviewers are committed to the ethical principles of animal research. This unethical and scientifically flawed paper will be used by investigators at other institutions to justify withholding opioid analgesics.
Sincerely,
Harold E Farris, DVM
Attending Veterinarian, University of North Carolina at Charlotte