Developing a Collaborative Agenda for Humanities and Social Scientific Research on Laboratory Animal Science and Welfare

Abstract

Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the ‘3Rs’), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including on issues around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, ‘cultures of care’, harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process outlined below underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving communication across different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy.

Recalibrating Veterinary Medicine through Animal Welfare Science and Ethics for the 2020s

“…Excluding broader stakeholder input and the imposition of lousy legislation or untutored policies can lead veterinarians and other exponents of animals to be at odds with their professional commitments [60,61]. They can also potentially disrupt meaningful discourses around animal use and care and ultimately fracture healthy human-animal interactions [62].…”

“…It also means acquiring skills in ethical reasoning and animal welfare science methods so that veterinarians can better engage with a variety of stakeholders. Acquiring these competencies can help veterinarians consider ways to integrate ethical reflection into practical or clinical settings and improve ethics dialogue, both within the profession and with external stakeholders (see, for example, [60,61,88]). In doing so, veterinarians will be in a better position to engage with the sciences and the different publics they encounter when disentangling dilemmas associated with animal health, behavior and affective states.…”

“…They encourage veterinarians to broaden their understanding of the normative and scientific questions facing their profession, the political and moral dimensions of their work, both locally and globally, and the cultural dimensions involved in addressing collective action problems such as zoonoses and the role that welfare may have in preventing them. Veterinarians working in the areas of animal welfare can benefit from exploring the possibilities of using the normative and conceptual analyses from other disciplines, including ethics and political, social environmental and public health sciences [60,64]. For example, as noted by [74], "work in public health ethics on how to understand the conceptual relation between individual health and collective health, can be fruitful for animal and environmental ethics, where there is often a polarized debate between scholars about the moral status of animals" (p. 2).…”

“…A centeredness on research highlights the importance of continuous innovation and scientific excellence. Here, innovation in veterinary medicine can occur best (i) through and in animal welfare science, the field of inquiry specifically committed to probing the interests of animals from their perspectives and their 'local realities,' in tandem with fruitful collaborations with non-veterinarians to consider the best deliberative frameworks from which to develop standards of best practice, and consider a broader view of 'the relevant literature,' modes of training and instructional design; and (ii) developing competencies in good governance and risk communication to address stakeholder engagement in honest and open dialogue about their values and attitudes towards animals (see, for example, the methodology in [60,61].…”

Humans, Other Animals and ‘One Health’ in the Early Twenty-First Century

“…79 Gunelius (2010), Ecohealth Alliance (2017). 80 For example: Davies et al (2016), Mwangi et al (2016). 81 Cairns and Krzywoszynska (2016). illuminates the ways in which animals have inadvertently shaped OH, and how OH aspires to shape them.…”