Breeding of Inbred and Transgenic strains of Mice
Ethical position established at its meeting 30 September 2009- Colony maintenance
- Breeding of animals which have harmful mutants.
- Form - ethics submission for importation of rats/mice with specific traits with possible welfare implications
With the increase of inbred genetically defined mice being use ethical issue arise which need to be addressed.
The two basic issue are;
A)The maintenance of colonies and over-breeding of mice with consequent culling
B) the breeding of animals which have direct welfare effects which are necessary for the study of the strain which they model.
A;) Colony maintenance
Currently BioResources hold about 60 distinct strains of mice. These need to be maintained as breeding colonies to ensure production of the appropriate test models which they represent.
The normal process of obtaining these animals is that a breed nucleus of either homozygous or heterozygous breed animal is imported from repositories such as Jackson Labs or the started colony is got from a collaborator in some other institute.
These pairs are bred up to achieve the appropriate colony size which will produce the necessary animals for experimental use.
This can take up to 6 months or so to achieve.
This process involves breeding animals and subsequently genetically testing the offspring to determine their genetic status as being useful for experimental use or for further breeding.
This involves a degree of waste as possibly 50 to 60 % of these animals will not carry the appropriate gene combination and are not useful for experimental use.
These animals are killed as being surplus to needs.
This in itself constitutes an ethical cost but one which is calculated in to the overall cost of doing the experiment.
However.
It is common for researchers to import animals which are bred up and then the researcher is not ready to use the animals which then involves animals being culled
Researcher may also intensively use animals for a period and then when the main purpose of the work has been achieved keep the colony ‘ticking over’ in case they want to use them again. Very often this does not happen and colonies are kept going with animals being culled on a regular basis.
Many of these colonies are not specifically unique and can be got again from a repository.
B. Breeding of animals which have harmful mutants
Many of the animals which are bred are maintained as a heterogeneous trait because the homozygous animals have a harmful trait which has a welfare issue.The breeding of these homozygous or animals with a harmful train is currently unregulated by the legal system but do cause pain and distress to the animals.
To that end the committee have decided that
1. Specific ethical permission needs to be obtained to import unique strains of animals and a specific plan of use be established prior to the permission being granted.
2. A specific time scale should be put in place for the maintenance of the colony.
3. The specific harmful effects of the mutant should be categorised for the strain and procedures put in place to alleviate any pain or distress which arises.
Ethics of using animals for scientific purposes
The use of animals for scientific purposes is an emotive subject and has been the subject of much debate and controversy.
This discussion is not a recent phenomenon. The very existence of the 1876 Act confirms this.
The first consideration which must be addressed, when studying the morality of using animals for scientific purposes, must be to put the use of animals by man into some type of general perspective.
Man has been using animals since he first came down from the trees. Through out his gradual attainment of dominance in the world, he has used them for food, transport, clothing, labour and sport. Use of animals for scientific purposes is simply a further extension of this.
Whether we have a right to do this or not is the next consideration.
When looking at this question it may be useful to consider those views of society which are most prevalent. These can be stated as:
1. An absolute right to use animals as we wish.
2. A conditional right to use animals.
3. A duty to care for animals.
4. No right to use animals in any way.
5. Their use is fraudulent
Absolute right
This is an extreme view, which holds that the feelings of animals have no function in the decisions which man makes to use animals to satisfy what ever needs he may have. This would have been fairly prevalent in 1876, but is not a widely held view now, I hope. Very often the exponents of this view will quote the bible to substantiate their argument. The philosophy of Descart , which describes animals in terms of 'Brute Machines' is also supportive of this view.
This view holds that animals are not capable of experiencing suffering due to their absence of a soul. They show pain reactions only as an automatic reflex in much the way a machine is engineered to respond to an action.
Conditional right
This view would require man to take the position that animals have a place in our world and that we must temper our demands on them by taking into account some sort of cost benefit analysis.
Duty to care
This is an extension of the conditional right which extends this thinking to the, now commonly held, view that the benefit which will be achieved must be in accordance with the degree of pain, distress or suffering which the animal will suffer. This imposes on society the duty to care for the total well-being of the animals which it uses.
No Right to use animals
'Speciesism' (singer)
This stance is fundamentally different from all other three positions. It compares the use of animals to the racism It gives the animals 'Natural Rights'. These rights are parallel to those of humans and disallows the use of animals in any form other than as equal partners in a companion animal relationship. Basically the concept is that we should only do to an animal what we would permit to be done to a human.
Person hood (regan)
This view confers on animals the ability to be aware of themselves. Regan argues that the value of an individual ( human or animal) cannot be measured by its usefulness to others, but only by its experience of the importance of its own life to itself.
The holders of this view will hold that humans should be vegetarians or even Vegas and no animals products should be used which exploit them in any way. The more extreme holders of this view employ terrorist methods to convince the general public that their view is the correct one.
Fraudulent use
The argument that the use of animals for scientific ends is fraudulent because it is not possible to extrapolate from animals to man.
This argument currently the most common argument used . It is used by the UK group 'Doctors against vivisection.'.
The say ' Testing a drug or chemical on a an animal provides no evidence that it is safe in humans This is because species differences; animals do not react in the same way to drugs and other substances as we do . Diseases which are induced artificially in the laboratory in order to evaluate drugs can never be compared to those arising spontaneously in humans' They then go on to quote various drugs which have been known to have side effects and have been with drawn from the market because they have caused problems. They say if animals tests were any good that these problems would have been foreseen before the drugs were licensed for use on the general public.
They often quote insulin as an example whose discovery was delayed by the use of animals by Banting and |Best. Penicillin comes in for comment quoting Fleminng as having injected a cat and a sick child . The comment is that the cat died. This is to show that if a cat had been used to test Penicillin that it would not have been used.
There are no details of why the cat was injected or if it was suffering from a disease which was susceptible to antibiotics.
This argument is quite seductive and builds on the public fear that mad scientists are busy changing the world for their egos and that drug companies are capitalising on these crazy ideas to make money and using animals experiments to fool the legislators and the public at large.
These arguments are further expanded to the position ''Animal-based research delays and hampers advances in medicine. Real advances have come from clinical, epidemiological and post mortem studies..... Where animal-based medicine has been helpful, this is despite animal experiments and not because of them , their safety only having been proved through use in humans'
The conclusion from this is that all moneys currently being used for animals based work should be directed to non animal based studies.
The problem about this argument is that it is an exclusive argument. It says absolutely that one way is better then another to the extent that you should not use the other. However this is unfortunately the weakness in the argument. it implies that science is a well ordered process with an ability to ask detailed questions perform experiments and to have confidence in the results. This is the public perception of science and one which maybe scientists like to encourage. The reality is that most scientists know a small amount about a small area and seek knowledge relentlessly in this area. They readily acknowledge that the more they discover the bigger the problem gets. They need to use all the tools available to them, including animal studies, to try an d track down elusive bits of evidence to answer questions. To deny them specific tools would simply hamper the process. Scientists do not share the confidence of these doctors that one simple line of enquiry will answer all questions. They will argue always for an inclusive approach rather then an exclusive one.
The answer for the majority of people lies somewhere in the middle of the ground. The aspiration is that we should get to a zero use of animals for scientific purposes. This is an unlikely goal but should be our aim. to achieve.
To take this middle ground, what is the current status? I think it would be best to sum this up by reference to the three principles of Russell & Burch (1959): Reduction, Refinement & Replacement.
Reduction
This involves the using of fewer animals. Not by just using fewer animals for each experiment which may have statistical ramifications but by increasing the use of shared results. This principle is embodied in a few EC Directives.
Article 22 of EC. Directive 86/609 states ' in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of experiments for the purpose of satisfying national or community health and safety legislation, Member States shall as far as possible recognise the validity of data generated by experiments carried out in the territory of another Member State unless further testing is necessary to protect public health and safety'
It should be particularly useful when new chemical compounds or registration of existing compounds takes place. This would mean that the toxicity tests of each component of each drug would not have to be repeated just because the results of the previous test are locked away in some companies files marked confidential. The registration authority should be able to use this data to assess another product when it is submitted to it. This raises some fairly thorny commercial problems but this should be soluble in the interests of animal welfare.
Refinement
This implies that we should get the maximum amount of information from each animal model which we use. It also means that we should use less and less invasive techniques to achieve this information. To this end it is important that each procedure which is performed is done so in an as expert a way as is possible. In this way rather then each new licensee being allowed to try and develop techniques from scratch he/she should be obliged to make use of experts who have considerable experience in the techniques and who can perform them efficiently. This will minimise the amount of suffering an animal under goes and will provide valid results at an early stage. This means that while the licensee will be the person licensed to perform the project he may be required to get an appropriate expert to perform some of the animal components of the work or at least to train him to do the techniques on a one-to-one basis. It also means that some existing tests will have to be modified to provide less suffering, an example of this is the modifications which have taken place in the use and performance of the traditional LD 50 test. While it has not been totally replaced regulatory bodies are accepting much less precise data on fewer animals which will give a broad classification of the lethal effects using less animals.
Replacement
This is of course the ultimate aim of most reasonable people. It is unlikely to be totally achievable but some advances have been made, for example the substitution of the classical rabbit pyrogen test by using LAL test. This makes use of the coagulation of horse shoe crab blood by pyrogens . It use is becoming more widely accepted.
There are alternatives to the Draize Eye Irritancy Test such as the use of isolated enucleated rabbit eyes, isolated bovine corneas and chick embryo membrane tests. A discussion on alternatives would be a full lecture in its self and this is not the time for it.
Conclusion
The use of animals will be with us for sometime yet. However the way they are being used has changed considerably over the years . This is as a result of the evolving values of our society. They will continue to evolve and actions which are acceptable today will no longer be acceptable in the future. Just as actions performed in the past are no longer acceptable now. This does not make their performance in their own time scale wrong . It just demonstrates the developing nature of our society.
References
Lives in balance Smith and Boyd
Man and Mouse Patton
Animals Liberation Singer
Armadillos to Zebra fish in Britinnica Medical Health Annual 1995 Quimpy