Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons^™

Dimensional Welfare Beyond Pain: Extending The Precautionary Principle In Birch’S “The Edge Of Sentience”, Willa M. Lane, Nicola S. Clayton

Animal Sentience

Birch's (2024) The Edge of Sentience identifies sentience candidates primarily through the pain-focused LSE Criteria. Yet, as Birch himself notes in Proposal 17, sentience is not pain. We argue that statutory welfare protections must therefore reach beyond pain, and that the right tool for doing so is Birch et al.’s (2020) dimensionality framework, which characterises conscious experience across five domains. Used together, the LSE Criteria establish that welfare is at stake, while the dimensionality framework maps what is at stake beyond pain to provide a taxon-specific profile of where captivity impoverishes experience. We apply this approach to invertebrate welfare and …

Birds, Bats And Minds. Tales Of A Revolutionary Scientist: Donald R. Griffin. Volume Three, Carolyn A. Ristau

eBooks

In this three-volume biography, we revisit the life and accomplishments of the revolutionary scientist, Donald R. Griffin. He encountered a lifetime of initial hostile resistance to his ideas and studies; now they are largely accepted. He and a colleague discovered the phenomenon of echolocation used by bats to navigate and capture insects, proposed that birds navigate guided by such cues as the sun and stars, and suggested that animals are likely aware, thinking and feeling beings. Forty interviews with his colleagues and friends help us understand the young emerging scientist and the mature researcher. We learn about his and others’ …

Animal Personality And Sentience As Distinct Concepts, Mark Briffa

Animal Sentience

Owens et al (2024) discuss how knowledge of both animal personality and sentience in target populations can be leveraged to enhance wildlife conservation programmes. In this commentary I expand on the distinction between these two concepts. Behavioural differences should be considered broadly across conservation programmes, not just those involving species deemed sentient.

Defining And Exploring Animal Sentience, Andrew N. Rowan, Joyce M. D'Silva Mrs, Ian J.H. Duncan, Nicholas Palmer

Animal Sentience

One of the commentaries on the target article notes that "animal sentience" is difficult to define operationally. This response to the commentaries develops a working, usable definition of animal sentience and examines the relationships between animal emotions and sentience.

Emotional Component Of Pain Perception In The Medicinal Leech?, Brian D. Burrell

Animal Sentience

Crump et al. have provided a series of criteria to assess animal sentience that is focused on the perception of pain, which is known to have both sensory and emotional components. They also provide a qualitative scoring system to assess data that address the eight criteria and apply this paradigm to decapod crustaceans. The criteria laid out have the potential to be applied to other invertebrates typically thought to have sensory response to tissue damage, but no emotional component to pain perception.

Animal Sentience: History, Science, And Politics, Andrew N. Rowan, Joyce M. D'Silva, Ian J.H. Duncan, Nicholas Palmer

Animal Sentience

This target article has three parts. The first briefly reviews the thinking about nonhuman animals’ sentience in the Western canon: what we might know about their capacity for feeling, leading up to Bentham’s famous question “can they suffer?” The second part sketches the modern development of animal welfare science and the role that animal-sentience considerations have played therein. The third part describes the launching, by Compassion in World Farming, of efforts to incorporate animal sentience language into public policy and regulations concerning human treatment of animals.

Heeding The Call Of Covid-19, David Wiebers, Valery Feigin

Animal Sentience

We are grateful to all of our commentators. They have provided a wide range of valuable perspectives and insights from many fields, revealing a broad interest in the subject matter. Nearly all the commentaries have helped to affirm, refine, expand, amplify, deepen, interpret, elaborate, or apply the messages in the target article. Some have offered critiques and suggestions that help us address certain issues in greater detail, including several points concerning industrialized farming and the wildlife trade. Overall, there is great awareness and strong consensus among commentators that any solution for preventing future pandemics and other related health crises must …

Intensive Animal Farming Conditions Are A Major Threat To Global Health, Cynthia Schuck-Paim

Animal Sentience

Wiebers & Feigin accurately propose that reducing the risks posed by infectious disease outbreaks and other global health challenges will depend critically on transitioning away from intensive animal farming practices. Creating the right incentive structure for this transition to happen is one of the great challenges in the years to come, but a much-needed step to ensure the health and well-being of current and future generations.

Brain Complexity, Sentience And Welfare, Donald M. Broom

Animal Sentience

Neither sentience nor moral standing is confined to animals with large or human-like brains. Invertebrates deserve moral consideration. Definition of terms clarifies the relationship between sentience and welfare. All animals have welfare but humans give more protection to sentient animals. Humans should be less human-centred.

Anthropogenic Suffering Of Farmed Animals: The Other Side Of Zoonoses, Jean-Jacques Kona-Boun

Animal Sentience

Wiebers & Feigin’s (W&F’s) target article warns of the zoonotic threat to human health from factory farming and urges phasing out meat production and consumption, for the benefit of both human and nonhuman animals. This commentary focuses on the physical and emotional suffering of farmed animals. This varies by species, production system and geographic location, but suffering is there throughout all stages of production — breeding, housing, transport, usage and slaughter. Ubiquitous monitoring of all facilities where farmed animals are kept, with surveillance cameras recording all phases of production would help reduce some forms of suffering. Other forms are caused …

What The Covid-19 Crisis Is Telling Humanity, David Wiebers, Valery Feigin

Animal Sentience

The planet is in a global health emergency exacting enormous medical and economic tolls. It is imperative for us as a society and species to focus and reflect deeply upon what this and other related human health crises are telling us about our role in these increasingly frequent events and about what we can do to prevent them in the future.

Cause: It is human behavior that is responsible for the vast majority of zoonotic diseases that jump the species barrier from animals to humans: (1) hunting, capture, and sale of wild animals for human consumption, particularly in live-animal markets; …

Rethinking Global Governance To Address Zoonotic Disease Risks: Connecting The Dots, Kelley Lee

Animal Sentience

Large-scale changes in human behaviour are urgently needed to prevent future pandemics involving zoonotic diseases such as COVID-19. However, this will not happen to the required degree, and with sufficient speed, without a major shift in how humanity collectively governs itself. Alongside a shift in focus from individual behaviours to the structural conditions underpinning the world economy that shape human behaviours, effective global governance presses us to connect more dots than ever before. The One Health approach is an important starting point but we need to go much further.

Plant-Based Diets And Covid-19: Those Who Harvest Crops Are At High Risk, Jarret S. Lovell

Animal Sentience

This commentary extends Wiebers & Feigin’s (2020) plea to adopt diets that are less dependent on animals by calling on experts and activists to work for change with regard to farm worker labor conditions. Already doing among the most dangerous jobs, farmworkers are at increased risk of COVID-19. As we increasingly transition to plant-based diets, we must all ensure that farmworkers have safe and just working conditions to meet the demands of our changing diets.

One Welfare, The Role Of Health Professionals, And Climate Change, Anne Fawcett

Animal Sentience

Wiebers & Feigin argue that the COVID-19 crisis is a call for humanity to rethink our relationships with animals and the environment. This One Welfare approach has implications for the role of health care professionals and demands that we address climate change.

A Belmont Report For Animals?, Hope Ferdowsian, L. Syd M. Johnson, Jane Johnson, Andrew Fenton, Adam Shriver, John Gluck

Professional Science Research Ethics Collection

Human and animal research both operate within established standards. In the United States, criticism of the human research environment and recorded abuses of human research subjects served as the impetus for the establishment of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, and the resulting Belmont Report. The Belmont Report established key ethical principles to which human research should adhere: respect for autonomy, obligations to beneficence and justice, and special protections for vulnerable individuals and populations. While current guidelines appropriately aim to protect the individual interests of human participants in research, no similar, comprehensive, …

Beyond The 3rs: Expanding The Use Of Human-Relevant Replacement Methods In Biomedical Research, Kathrin Herrmann, Francesca Pistollato, Martin L. Stephens

Biomedical Research and Alternative Methods Collection

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Russell and Burch’s pioneering book, The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. Their 3Rs framework has helped to inspire humane and scientific progress in experimental technique. However, it is time to update its strategic application. The 21st century has already seen the development of promising, high-tech non-animal models, such as organs-on-a-chip and computational approaches that, in our view, will replace animals as the default option in biomedical experimentation. How fast this transition will take place will depend on the pace at which these new models are optimized to reflect the biology of humans, rather …

Genetic Modification Of Animals: Scientific And Ethical Issues, Jarrod Bailey

Genetic Engineering and Cloning Collection

No abstract provided.

Publication Reform To Safeguard Wildlife From Researcher Harm, Kate A. Field, Paul C. Paquet, Kyle A. Artelle, Gilbert Proulx, Ryan K. Brook, Chris T. Darimont

Professional Science Research Ethics Collection

Despite abundant focus on responsible care of laboratory animals, we argue that inattention to the maltreatment of wildlife constitutes an ethical blind spot in contemporary animal research. We begin by reviewing significant shortcomings in legal and institutional oversight, arguing for the relatively rapid and transformational potential of editorial oversight at journals in preventing harm to vertebrates studied in the field and outside the direct supervision of institutions. Straightforward changes to animal care policies in journals, which our analysis of 206 journals suggests are either absent (34%), weak, incoherent, or neglected by researchers, could provide a practical, effective, and rapidly imposed …

Welfare Challenges Influence The Complexity Of Movement: Fractal Analysis Of Behaviour In Zebrafish, Anthony G. Deakin, Joseph W. Spencer, Andrew R. Cossins, Iain S. Young, Lynne U. Sneddon

Experimental Research and Animal Welfare Collection

The ability to assess welfare is an important refinement that will ensure the good condition of animals used in experimentation. The present study investigated the impact of invasive procedures on the patterns of movement of zebrafish (Danio rerio). Recordings were made before and after fin clipping, PIT tagging and a standard pain test and these were compared with control and sham handled zebrafish. The fractal dimension (FD) from the 3D trajectories was calculated to determine the effect of these treatments on the complexity of movement patterns. While the FD of zebrafish trajectories did not differ over time in either the …

Refinement On The Way Towards Replacement: Are We Doing What We Can?, Kathrin Herrmann

Humane Science Movement Collection

No abstract provided.

Retrospective Review Of Anesthetic And Analgesic Regimens Used In Animal Research Proposals, Kathrin Herrmann, Paul A. Flecknell

Experimental Research and Animal Welfare Collection

Pain has a profound effect on an animal’s wellbeing. In Germany, researchers using animals have been legally required to reduce any possible pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm to an absolute minimum since 1972. To evaluate how these provisions have been implemented in practice, an assessment of refinements to experimental techniques was conducted by retrospectively reviewing 684 surgical interventions described in 506 animal research applications that were sent to the German competent authorities for approval in 2010. This paper focuses on the efficacy of proposed anesthesia and peri- and postoperative analgesia. Postoperative analgesia was not proposed for 30% of surgeries. …

Contesting Animal Experiments Through Ethics And Epistemology: In Defense Of A Political Critique Of Animal Experimentation, Arianna Ferrari

Professional Science Research Ethics Collection

Generally, an animal experiment can be defined as an intervention on an animal, which causes suffering, harm, and distress, for scientific purposes. In this definition, animal experiments differ from more general scientific investigations concerning animals, such as observational studies in the wild in the fields of ethology or conservation, in which animals are involved but may not be harmed. Nowadays, the use of the term vivisection, in the case of animal experiments, is very controversial. This term originally referred to the cutting of living bodies for scientific purposes and has a long conceptual history (Maehle, 1992). In ancient times, it …

How Can The Final Goal Of Completely Replacing Animal Procedures Successfully Be Achieved?, Christiane Baumgartl-Simons, Christiane Hohense

Validation of Alternative Methods Collection

Article 23 of European Union (EU) Directive 86/609/EEC required that Member States promote the development and validation of alternative technologies and stated that the European Commission (EC) “shall report before the end of 1987 on the possibility of modifying tests and guidelines” (European Parliament, 1986, Article 23). This Directive was replaced by Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, which now requires that Member States develop and validate alternative approaches much more precisely and specifies that the ultimate objective is the “full replacement of procedures on live animals for scientific and educational purposes, as soon as …

The Moral Status Of Animal Research Subjects In Industry: A Stakeholder Analysis, Sarah Kenehan

Morality and Ethics of Animal Experimentation Collection

The use of non-human animals (hereinafter referred to as animals) in research and testing is a widely accepted practice in many industries. Millions of animals each year are subjected to painful procedures that include everything from physical mutilation to drug addiction. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (usda), over 820,812 animals were experimented on in the United States in 2016 (usda, 2017), though this count does not include rats, mice, or birds, and dubiously relies solely on the self-reporting of laboratories (Humane Society of the United States, 2011; Keen, 2019, Chapter 10 in this Volume). Estimates suggest that …

How To Evaluate The Science Of Non-Human Animal Use In Biomedical Research And Testing: A Proposed Format For Debate, Ray Greek, Lisa A. Kramer

Validation of Alternative Methods Collection

Over time, the interpretation of science has occasionally been corrupted by vested interest groups, be they financially motivated or ego driven. Scientific consensus and widespread public beliefs usually catch up with the evidence, but this can take a very long time and often costs lives. The use of non-human animals in biomedical research and testing is a scientific endeavor and, as such, can and should be evaluated in light of the best science currently available. But facts that have been accepted in all areas of science are routinely ignored or called into question by well-funded, vested interest groups, compromising the …

Rethinking The 3rs: From Whitewashing To Rights, Charlotte E. Blattner

Humane Science Movement Collection

Few other issues have prompted as many legislators to adopt legal instruction on the “proper” use of non-human animals (hereinafter referred to as animals) in medical and scientific research. Today, the 3Rs (replacement, reduction, and refinement of animals in scientific procedures) are globally accepted by a vast majority of states (Blattner, 2014); and prominent international organizations, such as the World Organisation for Animal Health (Terrestrial Animal Health Code, 2018, Article 7(8)(3)) and the Council of Europe (Convention for the Protection of Vertebrate Animals Used for Experimental and Other Scientific Purposes, 1986, Articles 6(2), 7 and 8). Widespread acceptance of the …

Beyond Plausibility Checks: A Case For Moral Doubt In Review Processes Of Animal Experimentation, Mara-Daria Cojocaru, Philipp Von Gall

Morality and Ethics of Animal Experimentation Collection

The fact that countries all over the world continue to develop new regulations for experimentation on non-human animals testament that this practice raises many doubts. Our aim in this chapter is to show that one important type of doubt should receive more attention: a particular type of moral doubt that could play a pivotal role in the ethical review of animal experiments. We assume that there are a range of emotions that indicate morally complex or problematic situations. When one or all of these emotions are experienced, we say that someone is experiencing moral doubt. To illustrate this point, we …

Human Wrongs In Animal Research: A Focus On Moral Injury And Reification, Jane Johnson, Anna Smajdor

Morality and Ethics of Animal Experimentation Collection

Using arguments derived from the work of Axel Honneth (2006), we show that animal research involves an institutionalized failure to recognize nonhuman animals that not only reifies animals but the human persons engaged in this process, diminishing the scope of their moral agency and causing moral injury. In this chapter, we begin by briefly articulating the harms to animals in research and the more conventional harms to humans that can arise as a result of animal research, before making a case for the ethical damage wrought by the failures of recognition inherent within the system of animal research. We conclude …

Replacing Animal Tests To Improve Safety For Humans, Kathy Archibald, Robert Coleman, Tamara Drake

Application of Alternative Methods Collection

In this chapter, we propose a new, pragmatic approach that could accelerate the replacement of most, if not all, regulatory animal tests with superior tests based on human biology. We also propose that changes to the requirements for safety testing, issued by the us Food and Drug Administration (fda), must be made in order to enable the use of superior new tests, which are currently disadvantaged by the outdated language of the regulations. But first, it is imperative to establish some level of understanding of the efficacy of existing animal-based methods in order to know whether any possible replacement is …

The Changing Paradigm In Preclinical Toxicology: In Vitro And In Silico Methods In Liver Toxicity Evaluations, Fozia Noor

Application of Alternative Methods Collection

In vitro methods, based on human primary cells, cell lines, and genetically modified reporter cell lines, have greatly expanded the scope of in vitro toxicology. Other significant progress in the area of human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) (Asgari et al., 2010; Schwartz et al., 2014; Shinde et al., 2016; Shtrichman, Germanguz and Itskovitz-Eldor, 2013) is allowing the application of patient and disease-specific hiPSCs (Ghodsizadeh et al., 2010; McCracken et al., 2014; Siller et al., 2013). Moreover, the tools of precise genome editing with engineered nucleases, such as the zinc finger nucleases (zfns), the transcription activator-like effecter nucleases (talens) and, more …