Gorilla

gorilla closeup

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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.

Rhesus Monkey

family of monkeys

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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.

Flea

electron microscope picture of a flea

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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.

Mouse

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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.

Rat

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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.

Chimpanzee

close up of chimp face

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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.

Chicken

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The farm animal welfare movement of 1960s England propelled/promoted scientists to evaluate animals’ welfare on farms, in homes, in zoos, and in laboratories. I call for us to shift our framework; animal welfare is more than just preventing pain and distress but also includes giving animals the best possible lives they can have. A dog running on the beach chasing a tennis ball is my gold standard of what we should aim for. I describe how welfare scientists combine a battery of physical and behavioral tests to develop the most reliable knowledge of what animals want,
need, loathe, or learn to tolerate. Animal welfare scientists and behavior experts can lead the way to better care of animals in labs, if we empower them. Their agenda will cost money for better animal housing and staffing to meet animals’ needs. They face barriers when vets prioritize physical health and hygiene over animals’ mental health, and when scientists believe—often erroneously—that enriched environments lead to too much variability in the animals, ruining their experiments. On the contrary, I show some of the many ways in which better animal welfare makes animals better research subjects that produce greater or more accurate medical progress, a win-win we should embrace.

Rabbit

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I tell the story of how an animal protection crusade built on a carefully drawn image of an animal—in this case fluffy, innocent rabbits—rippled out to help many other animal species. In a brilliant public pressure campaign, the activist Henry Spira asked, “How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty’s sake?” Soon, Revlon, other cosmetics companies, and chemical manufacturers were contributing to a fund to spur research into nonanimal safety tests for beauty products, industrial chemicals, and medicines. The search for nonanimal testing now benefits lab rodents, dogs, and even horseshoe crabs, and with more accurate tests, people too. Basic research scientists may still rely on animals for new discoveries in coming years, but technical and legal advances will soon shutter product safety testing labs.

Dog

Draft Chapter Outline: Not for distribution or quotation.

This is the first of four “species chapters” that show how different kinds of animals (dogs, rabbits, primates, and mice) have shaped the laws and protections we have developed for animals in labs. Some protections cross over to other kinds of animals; others are just for the animal that inspired them. More than any other animal, since the 1800s, dogs have been the poster animal for activists’ efforts to limit scientists’ animal experiments. Dogs’ identity as our friends, allies, and dependents led us to focus on how labs acquire their animals, whether snatching them up on the streets, commandeering them from animal shelters, or breeding them en masse on commercial dog farms. Dogs’ popular image as playful athletes always on the go put them at the vanguard for calls for more exercise for caged animals. Dogs’ role as family members has put them front and center in state-by-state efforts to go beyond our outdated federal laws to require labs to find homes for animals after their research tour of duty has ended.

Marmoset

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I show how difficult it is to answer the most important question about laboratory animals: just how useful and necessary are animal experiments? I watched marmoset monkeys suffer and die in experiments that simulated human Multiple Sclerosis, and well after I’d thought the experiments were dead ends, the United States licensed an MS treatment based on the marmosets who had suffered in our laboratories. Animal activists and research defenders each have their lists of animal testing bombs and bombshells; neither list convinces me to shutter all the labs or to approve every scientist’s application to launch an animal experiment. The necessity of animal testing changes daily, as scientists develop new nonanimal alternatives and we build a database for scoring case-by-case how animal and nonanimal tests succeed in predicting human medical outcomes. I conclude that animal experiments are still necessary for medical progress, despite reat advances in developing nonanimal tests. But not every experiment deserves the privilege of
using lab animals. We need to find better ways to weed out experiments in advance that hold
insufficient promise to justify animal suffering they would cause.