Animal Ethics Flashcards
What is the act that brought about ethical guidelines on experimenting on animals?
The Scientific Procedures Act - The Animal Act (1986)
List the 8 ethical guidelines for animals.
1) Housing and care
2) Anesthesia and euthanasia
3) Ethics and legislation
4) Number of animals used
5) Wild animals
6) Suppliers
7) Isolation and crowding
8) Reward and deprivation
Summarise the ‘housing and care’ ethical guideline.
Animals should be given enough food and water of their diet and should be kept in their appropriate environment with enough space to move freely.
Summarise the ‘anesthesia and euthanasia’ ethical guideline.
Animals should be protected from pain and euthanised if they are experiencing suffering.
Summarise the ‘ethics and legislation’ ethical guideline.
Researchers should ensure that the costs to the animals must be justified by the scientific benefit of the research and alternatives should be considered wherever harm is caused.
Summarise the ‘number of animals used’ ethical guideline.
Only the minimum number of animals should be used.
Summarise the ‘wild animals’ ethical guideline.
Disturbance to wild animals should be minimised, using lab reared animals over wild animals.
Summarise the ‘suppliers’ ethical guideline.
All captive-bred animals used by the researcher should be obtained from a Home Office registered supplier.
Summarise the ‘isolation and crowding’ ethical guideline.
When caging the animals, researchers should avoid overcrowding to reduce stress and isolation for social animals.
Summarise the ‘reward and deprivation’ ethical guideline.
When studying deprivation, researchers should consider the animal’s usual dieting patterns and when studying reinforcement researchers should deprive the animal of food giving the preferred food as a reward.
When permission to perform a studying is requested, what 3 R’s do the Home Office require demonstration of?
1) Replacing - using alternative animals wherever possible (e.g. using animals with no self-awareness)
2) Reducing - using minimum amount of animals
3) Refining - changing procedures to minimise suffering
What is one way to establish the benefits of research?
Using a cost-benefit analysis with Bateson’s decision cube (1986) to establish if the cost to the animals outweigh the benefits the research has to society.
What 3 pieces of criteria for a cost/benefit analysis does the Bateson’s decision cube use?
1) Quality of research
2) Cost of suffering to animals
3) Benefit of research to society
Evaluate 4 strengths of using animals in research.
1) High control due to lab conditions meaning causal relationship can be established
2) High reliability due to their faster breeding cycles allowing for quick replications to be made to compare over generations
3) High validity as animals used aren’t self-aware so can’t guess aims of research so can’t show DCs
4) Higher ethics as provides an alternative to testing on humans whilst still benefiting society
Evaluate 3 weaknesses of using animals in research.
1) Low generalisability due to animals still having qualitative differences in their brains and behaviour to humans due to evolutionary discontinuity in which humans brains are more evolved
2) Low ecological validity as lab studies have artificial environments in which the animals will behave differently than they would in familiar settings
3) Unethical as animals still experience pain and suffering in the place of humans breaking ethical guidelines anyway
