Law Commons^™

In 1966, lawmakers enacted what was to become the federal Animal Welfare Act with the noble intentions of providing a fundamental groundwork of minimum protections for nonhuman animals used in various contexts, including laboratory testing, the focus of this Article. Over the past fifty years, however, those basic protections have eroded or otherwise proven ineffective. Laboratories operate using different paradigms of welfare, many with inadequate oversight and reporting, and the species comprising over ninety percent of test subjects have been completely written out of the very definition of “animal” in the statute. Scientific and technological advances call into question the …