Veterinary Medical Ethics

Ethical question of the month — June 2011

The use of primates in research is tightly controlled by animal care committees in North America to ensure that unnecessary suffering is not endured by these animals. These regulations, however, often increase the cost of performing certain studies. As a result, some researchers are considering performing their primate research in countries where housing costs are less and where laboratory animal care regulations are not as strict as in North America. Should privately or publicly funded research originating in North America be performed on primates in these more cost-effective and permissive countries? Should this research be published in North American scientific journals?

Responses to the case presented are welcome. Please limit your reply to approximately 50 words and forward along with your name and address to: Ethical Choices, c/o Dr. Tim Blackwell, Veterinary Science, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, 6484 Wellington Road 7, Unit 10, Elora, Ontario N0B 1S0; telephone: (519) 846-3413; fax: (519) 846-8178; e-mail: tim.blackwell@ontario.ca

Suggested ethical questions of the month are also welcome! All ethical questions or scenarios in the ethics column are based on actual events, which are changed, including names, locations, species, etc., to protect the confidentiality of the parties involved.

Ethical question of the month — March 2011

Animal welfare considerations play an increasingly prominent role in the societal ethic. Animal care and use committees at research institutions are composed of laypeople, animal scientists, veterinarians, and ethicists, who are charged with judging the value of various animal use protocols. These committees are expected to balance the welfare of animals against the benefits that may result to animals or society as a result of animal use. Such committees are seldom held in high regard by the individuals submitting the protocols, and their decisions are often severely criticized. Is it even reasonable to expect that a committee can objectively compare the stress or suffering experienced by the animals in question against any potential benefits resulting from such animal use?

An ethicist’s commentary on the credibility of animal care and use committees

This case raises a variety of interesting ethical questions. It is appropriate to begin by examining some of the relevant facts. Though the US legal requirement for ACUCs was inspired by the Canadian system of self-regulation during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I and two laboratory animal veterinarians and an attorney drafted 1985 US legislation designed to ensure ethical scrutiny of animal research and control of animal pain and distress, the system in Canada was not backed by federal law. While it may therefore be the case, as the question suggests, that “such committees are seldom held in high regard by individuals submitting the protocols” (which I doubt), in the US, at least, violation of the federal principles underlying the law may well (and has) resulted in seizure of all government research funding to the institution in question. For this reason alone, researchers tend to be respectful of ACUC decisions growing out of protocol review. In addition, members of such committees tend to be senior faculty, often enjoying high status in the scientific community and among their institutional peers. In fact, during the 30 years that I have served on the ACUC at my institution, I can recall only one case where a researcher was openly disrespectful of the ACUC, and she experienced significant censure from her peers, even a questioning of her suitability for tenure by a dean. If nothing else, canny researchers realize that protocol review by committees helps support them if they are besieged by activists or questioned by the public or by the press regarding their use of animals.

Second, the case’s assumption that such committees are “charged with judging the value of various animal use protocols,” is, at least in the United States, in large measure false. Such judgments, in US science, are made by peer-review groups working under the aegis of funding agencies. The overwhelming task of institutional ACUCs is assuring that animal use is appropriate in the protocol being evaluated. This means looking at statistical design, feasibility of non-animal alternatives, looking at reduction in the number of animals and refinement of protocols to make them less invasive. In my experience on two major animal care and use committees since 1980, the vast majority of committee time is spent fixing up animal use, and protocols are very rarely rejected on the basis of cost/benefit calculations. In fact, in the US, for committees to reject outright a protocol for cost/benefit reasons is extremely rare, and is not technically authorized by the statutes creating such committees, in contrast to human subjects research review boards, which are explicitly charged with evaluating cost/benefit. Having said that, it is important to stress that on some occasions ACUCs will exceed their authority and turn down a proposed study on the grounds that it involves too much animal suffering, or aims to answer a meaningless question.

I have long argued that ACUCs containing a majority of nonscientists and public members should, in fact, be explicitly authorized to judge cost/benefit. After all, if research is largely being done with public money, the public ought to be the arbiter of how such money is expended. Peers in the same field as a researcher are, virtually by definition, biased in favor of the legitimacy of the question being asked and the animal use methods deployed to find an answer, however invasive those methods may be.

A final thorny question raised by this case concerns the cogency of cost/benefit analyses for weighing animal suffering against human benefit. Cost/benefit analysis seems relatively cogent when costs and benefits can be expressed in the same quantitative calculus. Thus, a business decision to hire another employee is a straightforward instance to which cost/benefit can be reasonably applied. If hiring such an employee is going to cost $1000 a week for salary and benefits, but generates $1500 in new revenue, it is perfectly straightforward and obvious that such a hiring is justified. On the other hand, how can one rationally weigh an advance in basic scientific knowledge against the suffering and pain and death of 2500 rats? Clearly, such judgment will inevitably be hopelessly biased by the values, including ethical values, of those doing the calculating. For those whose values do not include any moral concern for animals, any amount of scientific knowledge to be gained in an experiment clearly outweighs any amount of concern for animal suffering. This is another way of saying that having only scientists do the weighing, as is the case in peer-review, does not give the animals and their interests the requisite fair hearing.

In fact, perhaps surprisingly, animal care and use committees seem to enjoy a good amount of credibility with the public, and societal restiveness concerning animal research seems to have diminished considerably since the mandating of such committees. It is for this reason among others that I have argued for the need for considerable transparency regarding the workings and deliberations of these committees, particularly regarding detailed minutes of committee meetings made available to the public to ensure that they do not function as a monolith, but in fact reflect a broad range of societal opinions. Too many research institutions redact too much of their minutes for fear of societal rejection. To the contrary, I advocate as much openness as possible given proprietary considerations in order to reassure the public that committees are representative of societal concerns.