The Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand is not for the faint-hearted but what spectacular and unusual landscapes. It doesn’t only resemble Mordor–Peter Jackson used it as the location shoot for Mount Doom in the Return of the King, the last of the Lord of the Rings films.
It is sightings like this that make travelling worth it.
El Questro Station (station is Strayan for huge cattle ranch with wild cows roaming a property the size of Oklahoma). We’d book a campsite creekside but two weeks ago a wee Saltie moved in Only a 7-footer but up went the No Swimming signs. Everyone here is discussing next travel stops as early rains have the campgrounds and parks and gas stations closing. The single roadhouse with diesel on some 200 mile dirt track (Gibb River Road) is on Wet season hours (2 hours a day; not on Sundays).
Change of plans. Heavy rains last night, so do we want to be the first ones to drive this bit this morning? The downside of starting our days at 5, but there are other hikes to welcome us. Near El Questro Station in Western Australia.
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Fifty years after my stint as a zookeeper, I returned to my Boston zoo and took stock of animal welfare advances in zoos and in labs. I close my book with my manifesto of the work we still need to do, sooner rather than later. I list my priorities for legal reforms that will bring more animals under the protections of our Animal Welfare Act, and that will push ethics committees to go beyond their current narrow focus on preventing pain and distress. I call for a more expansive vision of the life animals in our labs deserve. I push to find ways to bring in more voices and perspectives to limit animal experiments exclusively to high quality science that will produce knowledge for important matters of human, animal, and environmental health. I want the medical advances that still require some animal testing, but only if we can do better by the animals in our labs.
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Our animal welfare laws should advance the ethic that harming animals requires justification.
The US has welfare oversight systems (two laws, plus an independent accreditation program) that guarantee most lab animals access to veterinary care, cages large enough to meet government standards, and provisions to protect their physical and mental health. The patchwork of laws and accreditation leaves too many animals without legal protections, and the standards for housing and caring for the animals has not kept up with advances in animal welfare science.
Animals in laboratories suffer more than they should, given what we know and given what they deserve. Our system of self-regulation leaves much in the hands of institutional animal ethics committees, and they fall short in two ways. These committees shy away from seriously considering the ethical justification for a scientist’s proposed research projects, i.e. they do not usually balance harms to animals against potential benefits for people. Moreover, most current ethics committees exclude the diversity of values and viewpoints that could promote a robust ethical review, erecting barricades to democratic participation or even to the most basic level of transparency. Thus, I outline my proposals for a next round of updated laws and policies that will bring us closer to the principal that no sentient animal should be harmed without a strong justification.
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I make explicit the implicit ethical premises that guide the book: harming animals requires
justification. As a society, we have decided that animals have some middle moral status, not as
high as we grant to our fellow humans, but higher, deserving of greater deference, than a table or
a head of broccoli. I prioritize sentience, animals’ capacity for pleasures and suffering, and
would expand our sphere of concern to all plausibly sentient animals, not just monkeys and dogs,
but mice, fish, and maybe hermit crabs as well. I argue that pain and distress are not the only
harms in the animal lab, and that we should consider all confinement and all deprivations harms
to be minimized. Why should a dog in a lab have a shorter or duller life than a dog running on
the beach? Collectively, our society has decided that humans can harm animals for our purposes,
including for medical experimentation, but we must somehow put limits on what we do to
animals. We must minimize suffering, pain, and distress, but more, we must balance those harms
against the potential benefits of an experiment, and reject experiments that fail this harm-benefit
analysis. In our current practices, scientists cannot decide alone that their work deserves funding
and permission to use animals, but our system of scientist-heavy ethics committees does not go
far enough in speaking for animals’ interests or opening decision-making to science boosters and
skeptics alike.
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This is my fourth “species chapter,” but with a twist. Where tales of dogs, rabbits, and monkeys catalyzed assorted new protections for laboratory animals, mice have done the opposite. Mice garner little public sympathy. They are excluded from the US Animal Welfare Act, legally not “animals” at all. Biotechnology and genetic engineering developed first among mammals in mice now threatens to bring other species, genetically engineered monkeys in particular, back into the labs just as we have been seeing their numbers decrease. Ethics committees and scientists score it as a victory for animal welfare when they can clear the labs of dogs, or woodchucks, or monkeys or other animals by switching to mice, and often in much greater numbers than the larger animals. Mice give labs permission of sorts to continue animal testing, far from public scrutiny or concern. It’s past time to let mice become legal “animals” and extend Animal Welfare Act protections to them.
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Pain management for laboratory animals is a high priority and a veterinarian’s challenge: how do we recognize it, prevent it, and treat it? I show that animal pain can be surprisingly difficult to see, leading to a “if we don’t see it, it’s not a problem” mindset that hurts animals. I call for a greater human awareness of animal pain, and better use of more pain medicines in more animal experiments. Against charges that I am too anthropomorphic, I challenge readers to bring what they know about pain from their personal experiences, supplemented by what life with dogs and cats can teach us, so that we think more deeply about pain in other animals. I challenge vets and scientists to be aggressive in fighting against animal pain, confident that pain-free animals are usually better research subjects. What’s more, the animals deserve this.
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Chimps and monkeys in my lifetime evolved, in the public imagination) from smelly, vulgar clowns to intelligent, sensitive creatures who command respect and need protections. The new appreciation for chimps spawned
by 1960s television documentaries quickly raised the status of other primates, like rhesus monkeys and marmosets.. Riding this new respect for primates, animal rights activists exposed monkey mistreatment in two labs in the 1980s and stirred Congress to pass new welfare regulations. Dogs underscored the importance of letting lab animals run and play and cozy up to people, while rabbits personified the innocent animals we should protect. Monkeys and apes,
with their fierce intelligence, inspired a law to promote their psychological well-being. They set the example for environmental enrichment for all captive, caged animals. The word “enrichment” may suggest that the status quo is acceptable and that giving caged animals toys, friends, or novelty is an optional extra. I argue that the status quo is impoverished, and that both the quality of animal experiments and the quality of life of the animals improves when we re-set our standard of what is acceptable animal care in our laboratories.