Share thisAccording to animal welfare ethologists, animals should be evaluated based upon their natural behaviour to improve the quality of experimental data collected.
Concern for animal welfare is nothing new. In 1959, two British scientists, Bill Russell and Rex Burch, famously presented an agenda now known as the three Rs for parsimonious use of animals in research: scientists would be diligent in searching to replace animal experiments with non-animal methods, refine experiments to eliminate suffering, and reduce the number of animals required in individual experiments and overall by improving the return from each experiment involving an animal.
The influence of their publication, The Principles of Humane Experimentation Technique, on both politics and ethics cannot be understated, and the move to take account of the animal now touches people wherever non-human individuals are part of a research protocol.
Animal welfare ethologists state forthrightly that a prerequisite for reliable biomedical data is an animal free to express itself naturally. The pressure to cope with unnatural conditions, they say, affects every aspect of the animal’s emotional experience—and therefore its biochemistry and behaviour— which in turn raises the spectre of experimental data that is ambiguous if not misleading.
EXPRESSING SPECIES-SPECIFIC BEHAVIOUR
Animal ethologists say that taking the three R’s seriously calls for a re-thinking of how we keep and manage experimental animals; in a standard laboratory environment, it is virtually impossible for animals to behave naturally and trying to adapt can mean poor quality of life for the animal and compromised data. Providing a research environment within which the animal may express species-specific behaviour, many propose, is at the heart of refinement.
“The need to suppress natural behaviour and adapt is a hardship”, says animal welfare scientist Francoise Wemelsfelder, a senior scientist at the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC) in Edinburgh, UK, who leads a research programme on qualitative welfare assessment in farm animals, and is working with government and industry to implement this approach for practical welfare inspection. Dr Wemelsfelder holds the prestigious BSAS/RSPCA Award presented for major contributions to animal welfare and is also considered a leader on quantitative measurement of emotional communication via body language. She adds “for animals it might be even worse than for humans. Humans can explicitly reflect on—and protest against—their unhappiness, and are equipped to put experience in a wider perspective. Animals might have no idea why it is happening to them and feel helpless and trapped”.