12. Killing animals as a necessary evil? The case of animal research

Franco, Nuno Henrique; Olsson, I. Anna S.

doi:10.3920/978-90-8686-808-7_12

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Within our animal-centered framework, we argue that the welfare of partakers should be guaranteed also after their use in research, by adopting a "no-kill" approach whenever possible. This is in line with a new set of "3Rs" (Re-use, Rehabilitation and Rehoming) according to which a high animal welfare level ensured during a trial is also maintained or even improved after the end of the trial (for an extensive review on the topic see Franco, 2016;Franco and Olsson, 2016). The application of these Rs would significantly contribute toward the higher scoring of a study against the welfare principle.…”

Section: Principle 3: Partakers' Welfare Prioritizationmentioning

confidence: 55%

Relevance, Impartiality, Welfare and Consent: Principles of an Animal-Centered Research Ethics

Mancini

Nannoni

2022

Front. Anim. Sci.

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The principles of Replacement, Reduction and Refinement (3Rs) were developed to address the ethical dilemma that arises from the use of animals, without their consent, in procedures that may harm them but that are deemed necessary to achieve a greater good. While aiming to protect animals, the 3Rs are underpinned by a process-centered ethical perspective which regards them as instruments in a scientific apparatus. This paper explores the applicability of an animal-centered ethics to animal research, whereby animals would be regarded as autonomous subjects, legitimate stakeholders in and contributors to a research process, with their own interests and capable of consenting and dissenting to their involvement. This perspective derives from the ethical stance taken within the field of Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), where researchers acknowledge that an animal-centered approach is essential to ensuring the best research outcomes. We propose the ethical principles of relevance, impartiality, welfare and consent, and a scoring system to help researchers and delegated authorities assess the extent to which a research procedure aligns with them. This could help researchers determine when being involved in research is indeed in an animal's best interests, when a procedure could be adjusted to increase its ethical standard or when the use of non-animal methods is more urgently advisable. We argue that the proposed principles should complement the 3Rs within an integrated ethical framework that recognizes animals' autonomy, interests and role, for a more nuanced ethical approach and for supporting the best possible research for the benefit animal partakers and wider society.

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Section: Principle 3: Partakers' Welfare Prioritizationmentioning

confidence: 55%

Relevance, Impartiality, Welfare and Consent: Principles of an Animal-Centered Research Ethics

Mancini

Nannoni

2022

Front. Anim. Sci.

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“…Such obligations to care for and about others complicate simple and absolute ideas of necessity, with tensions between care relations generating characterisations of animal research as a 'necessary evil' (Blakemore 2008;Masterton et al 2014;Franco and Olsson 2016), a practice which may conflict with one's ethics of care towards certain members of their moral community but is at times felt to be necessary for the sake of others. That feelings of moral ambiguity may remain even when experiences of aging, illness, and death imbue biomedical uses of animals with necessity thus emphasises that concerns towards the issue cannot be explained away by gesturing to medical benefits.…”

Section: Regretting the Use Of Animals To Mitigate Vulnerabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating the necessity of biomedical animal use through relations with vulnerability

McGlacken

2023

BioSocieties

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In the UK, claims are often made that public support for animal research is stronger when such use is categorised as for medical purposes. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of writing from the Mass Observation Project, a national writing project documenting everyday life in Britain, this paper suggests that the necessity of using animals for medical research is not a given but understood relationally through interactions with inherent vulnerability. This paper stresses the ubiquity of ambivalence towards uses of animals for medical research, complicating what is meant by claims that such use is ‘acceptable’, and suggests that science-society dialogues on animal research should accommodate different modes of thinking about health. In demonstrating how understandings of health are bound up with ethical obligations to care for both human and non-human others, this paper reinforces the importance of interspecies relations in health and illness and in the socio-ethical dimensions of biomedicine.

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“…The ethics used in animal experimentation is mainly utilitarian [23], based on a harm-benefit analysis: weighing the burdens against the benefits and thus justifying the use of large numbers of laboratory animals for gathering knowledge that can help large numbers of humans or other animals, or protect ecosystems or the environment [24]. The utilitarian case for rehoming all redundant laboratory vertebrates that are healthy and rehomeable is that a life worth living (at least from that moment on) is prolonged, while for the volunteering adopter there is a small burden and a great pleasure.…”

Section: Ethical Argumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why All Healthy Laboratory Animals Should Be Rehomed, No Matter How Small

Van Loo,

Janssens

2023

Animals

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This paper explores the ethical imperative of rehoming all healthy animals of sentient species after experiments have finished or when they have become otherwise redundant. We take into account disparate perspectives in animal ethics and see how they point in the same direction. We illustrate our case with our own rehoming experience from the joint Animal Welfare Body of Utrecht University and the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the Netherlands. The primary pilot proved successful, after which the principle of rehoming became standing policy and common practice. We discuss several challenges and our responses to those through continuous evaluation of the adoption program.

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12. Killing animals as a necessary evil? The case of animal research

Cited by 11 publications

References 43 publications

Relevance, Impartiality, Welfare and Consent: Principles of an Animal-Centered Research Ethics

Relevance, Impartiality, Welfare and Consent: Principles of an Animal-Centered Research Ethics

Negotiating the necessity of biomedical animal use through relations with vulnerability

Why All Healthy Laboratory Animals Should Be Rehomed, No Matter How Small

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