Ethical question of the month — May 2016

Ethical question of the month — May 2016

A veterinarian treats a middle-aged dog with a mild cough symptomatically and fails to identify a heart murmur. Another veterinarian treats a vomiting dog symptomatically and fails to test for an intestinal blockage. A third veterinarian treats a calf that is not eating with antibiotics and fails to consider rabies in the differential diagnosis. In each of these cases a second opinion is sought after the initial treatment fails to resolve the clinical signs. In each case the second opinion veterinarian, with the benefit of knowing the failed treatment histories, performs further diagnostics and arrives at the correct diagnosis. In these and similar situations the initial veterinarians are at risk of being cited for a substandard level of care. Are veterinarians allowed to make mistakes? Does every case require that all possible diagnoses be explored at the time of the first examination?

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, 6486 E. Garafraxa, Townline, Belwood, Ontario N0B 1J0; telephone: (519) 846-3413; fax: (519) 846-8178; e-mail: tim.e.blackwell@gmail.com

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 — February 2016

A model for a rare but fatal disease of children has been created in laboratory mice. Should the number of mice that suffer and die in studies utilizing these mice be a consideration in any way when research intended to cure or control this disease is proposed? Would the answer change if this rare and fatal disease affected only dogs?

Mice as models for children’s disease — Comments

In Canada the number of mice utilized must be a consideration when research is proposed to the local Animal Care Committee (ACC). The Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), the national peer-review organization responsible for setting, maintaining, and overseeing the implementation of high standards for animal ethics and care in science, requires the ACC to carefully evaluate the number of animals proposed by a researcher. CCAC-certified institutions are to follow CCAC standards. In many provinces this is a legal requirement. Employing strategies that will result in fewer animals being used and which are consistent with sound experimental design (1) is Reduction, a crucial component of the 3Rs (i.e., Replacement, Reduction, Refinement), all three of which must be considered by the researcher in that interaction with the ACC.

There is no difference in approach applied to research benefiting only animals (dogs in this instance) from the situation posed involving research directly benefiting humans.

Douglas W. Morck, DVM, PhD, University Veterinarian, University of Calgary, Professor, Science and Veterinary Medicine, University of Calgary

An ethicist’s commentary on mice as models for children’s disease

This case in essence once again raises the perennial question of moral legitimacy of research on animals for human or other animal benefit. In the many papers I have devoted to animal research I have concluded that there is no clear moral justification for hurting others for our benefit, but that we will certainly continue to do so. Given the social tendency to raise the moral status of animals, it is not clear whether this question will arise to a major moral issue confronting society. But it is heartening that concern for minimizing pain, suffering, and death of research animals has spread globally. In Europe for example, there has been a significant rejection of the use of animals in testing the safety of cosmetics encoded in law. This in turn reflects consumer rejection of hurting animals in science and toxicology testing for what is ever-increasingly being seen as trivial reasons. Even the National Institutes of Health have abandoned the use of chimpanzees in research, as have most other countries. It is also encouraging that analgesia for laboratory animals is being taken seriously.

In the early 1980s, when I was part of a group drafting US legislation assuring the welfare of laboratory animals, I did a literature search under the rubric of “analgesia for laboratory animals,” which depressingly revealed no papers. When I broadened the search term to “analgesia for animals,” only 2 papers turned up, 1 of which affirmed that there ought to be papers. Largely as a result of the efficacy of US federal law, when I repeated the search a few years ago on analgesia for laboratory animals, it turned up almost 13 000 papers.

It is thus unquestionable that care of laboratory animals has significantly improved in the past few decades. And surveys have not surprisingly shown that public support for animal research is significantly higher when the research does not involve pain and suffering than when it does. Yet the major justification for invasive research on animals continues to be the benefit that results. The study described in this case, researching a fatal disease of children, is a paradigmatic example of what society would consider a justifiable use of animals even when pain and suffering is involved. Nonetheless, US law demands a careful statistical justification of the number of animals used, as well as the limiting and controlling of pain as much as possible. This involves not only use of anesthesia and analgesia, but also creating early “endpoints” for the animals used, i.e., euthanizing them before suffering becomes pronounced, if at all possible, and researchers conducting a search for alternatives to animal use.

All of this notwithstanding, there are significant numbers of scientists who continue to believe the issue of controlling animal suffering to be an intrusive and illegitimate imposition on scientific freedom. I believe that the number of scientists in that camp will shrink as young scientists are taught, contrary to what I call “scientific ideology,” that science is not “value-free in general and ethics-free in particular.” Cognizance of ethical issues in science by scientists, like the question of research animal suffering, is an essential part of public support for science.

Changing the situation, as the case does, from children to dogs, does not appreciably alter the discussion we have provided. As we have indicated in previous columns, dogs are ever-increasingly being viewed as “members of the family.” This is of course evidenced by the proliferation of canine oncological research and the willingness of clients to spend money on cancer treatment. Whether or not it makes sense from an ethical theory point of view or not, certain animals are favored over others. I seriously doubt that society would accept a version of this case where research was being done on dogs to cure diseases of mice!