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10 Info. Rep.: Animal Welfare Inst. 1 (1961)

handle is hein.animal/awiqu0010 and id is 1 raw text is: TN MA~ TON ANIMAL WELFARE INSTITUTE 22 EAST 17th STREET, NEW YORK 3, N. Y. January-February, 1961 Vol. 10 No. I With the kind permission of the distinguished English medical journal, The Lancet, the following article from the February 25, 1961 issue is reprinted. EXPERIMENT ON ANIMALS IN THE UNITED STATES A bill to provide for the humane treatment of animals used in experiment was introduced in the United States Senate last year by Senator Cooper and others and in the House of Representatives by the Hon. Martha Griffiths. It is based on British law and practice, with simplification of the procedure for granting licences and some modifica- tions necessitated by the difference between the American and British constitutions. The problem of States rights has been circumvented by simply providing that no individual or institution experimenting on animals shall be licensed to receive a grant from Federal funds unless he or it has received from the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare a certificate of compliance with the require- ments of the Act. These requirements relate, among other things, to the housing and husbandry of the animals, a pain rule, records, the suitability of an applicant for a licence, and the filing of a project plan setting out the methods and procedures to be used. The applicant's plan may be disallowed, but he must be given a reasonable op- portunity to justify it. An important difference from British practice is neces- sitated, no doubt, by the difficulty of introducing restric- tions all at once into a vast research machine which is in full operation. In Britain permission must be given before an experimenter can use procedures of the kind or kinds which he specifies (with greater or less precision as the case may require) in his application for certificates. But when or if. the Cooper Bill comes into operation as an Act, time will be needed to scrutinise all the project plans, which will have to be filed; and meanwhile research must go on, including perhaps some procedures which may have to be discontinued on later consideration. Presumably, while some procedures which are clearly unethical might be disallowed at once, most plans would have to be al- lowed provisionally pending review. It would be unrealistic to hope that in every laboratory throughout the United States the treatment of animals can be brought overnight into conformity with the practice of the best American laboratories. Precedents will have to be created and standards agreed upon, and, although British experience may be found helpful, all this will take time. We may hope, however, that cruel procedures will be grad- nally eliminated, and also that the standard of husbandry in the least advanced American research establishments will be gradually raised towards that of the most advanced; and that the right to experiment will from an early stage be restricted to persons who are qualified to make proper use of it. These would surely not include schoolchildren, who at present are being encouraged in some quarters to repeat injurious experiments on animals. The Bill is being somewhat fiercely assailed on one side by antivivisectionists and on the other by their more extryme opponents. The latter have represented British medical science as of inferior quality through a supposed frustration of medical research by Home Office control. For instance, an assertion which is widely current is to the effect that the British Act requires a separate document to be filed in respect of every individual animal used. In view of such allegations, the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare sent a questionary to all biological fellows of the Royal Society, and the replies have shown an over- whelming concensus in favour of Home Office control. As one of them says, the Act of 1876 stops the frivolous but not the responsible worker. America's example in the treatment of laboratory ani- mals will have widespread effects in other countries; the fate of the Cooper Bill will therefore be watched attentively. /77-; UNJUST ATTACK ON BILLS FOR HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS In response to the article in the March, 1961 Reader's Digest, Vivisection - An Explosive Issue Again, Henry Beetle Hough, distinguished author and Editor of the Vineyard Gazette, wrote: Vineyard Gazette Edgartown,- Mass. February 23, 1961 Editors, Reader's Digest Pleasantville, N. Y. Gentlemen,- The article Vivisection -- An Explosive Issue Again in your March issue is open to serious challenge on the ground of honesty and accuracy. With the characterizations of the anti-vivisectionists it is likely that any well informed and objective reader will agree. But the writer, J. D. Ratcliff, proceeds to strong condemnation of the Cooper Bill and of the Society for Animal Protective Legislation without allow- ing his readers to know that the anti-vivisectionists are at war with both. Objectively, one may conclude reasonably that the Cooper Bill, if it can be enacted, will do more to protect medical research from the anti-vivisectionists than anything else that can be proposed. Mr. Ratcliff refers to the well-meaning but misguided efforts of the Animal Welfare Institute The phrases are obviously chosen for the purpose of discrediting the Animal Welfare Institute and those who support it. Yet this is the organization primarily responsible for enactment of the hu- mane slaughter bill which has, at long last, introduced a great measure of humanity into the slaughtering industry. It may be noted that the United States was far behind the countries of Europe in civilized usages, and that special pleaders for the American meat industry used the same specious argu- ments against the Animal Welfare Institute that are now applied by Mr. Ratcliff. Yet the humane slaughter legislation proved entirely practical and certainly was not misguided, The medical profession is by no means as united against the Cooper Bill as Mr. Ratcliff suggests. I have before me a clipping from the New York Times in which Dr. Herbert Rackow, assistant professor of anesthesiology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, defends the bill in realistic terms and disposes of the objections. There is abundant evidence that the medical profession is too careless or indifferent or pre-occupied to safeguard the care of animals undergoing or about to undergo experimenta- tion. Here in Massachusetts, during debate on the so-called animal seizure bill, the profession gave unqualified assur- ances that seized animals would be humanely cared for. Within a matter of weeks after passage of the bill, animals kept for the use of one of the best known clinics in America were found being kept under atrocious conditions in a state of semi-starvation and cruelty. As in the slaughtering industry, the United States in animal experimentation lacks the humane safeguards which have been adopted elsewhere, in Great Britain for instance, with- out detriment to research. There was available to Mr. Rat- cliff, had he been interested, a complete body of information as to the program of the Animal Welfare Institute, stating clearly the ways in which care is being taken to protect ani- mal research under all reasonable conditions. I think it is unfortunate for the reputation for fairness en- joyed by the Reader's Digest that Mr. Ratcliff was chosen to denounce a cause advocated by so many informed and able people. It is unfortunate because Mr. Ratcliff is a medical writer deeply committed to the case he espouses, even in advance of investigation. He is a special pleader with an interest in one side of the discussion. The opposition of the anti-vivisectionists to the purposes and work of the Animal Welfare Institute is well-documented. As a newspaper, we have received many evidences of it. The reasons for the opposition are obvious, for if proper safeguards are provided for animal experimentation, safe- guards now completely lacking, the anti-vivisectionists will have no further chance of prevailing in the court of public opinion. Yours very truly, (signed) HENRY BEETLE HOUGH To Mr. Hough's clear analysis of the matter as a whole should be added correction of misleading information on the provisions and effects of the legislation as described in the Digest article. First, the statement in the article that the bill introduced last year by Senator Cooper (and this year, with small modifications, by Representative Martha Griffiths) 'provides that animals subject to ex- perimental surgery 'shall be killed without being allowed to recover consciousness, has misled readers. This pro- vision applies to work by students in practice surgery (Continued on next page)

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