Earlier this month, the EU adopted new guidelines for the housing and care of laboratory animals. For benefit of policy wonks, these are known as Appendix A to the Council of Europe Convention on animal experimentation ETS123.
The revisions were politically driven, but what do they mean for medical research? Probably not much in the UK. But you wouldn’t know it from the antivivisection spin.
Predictably, the UK’s National Anti Vivisection Society (NAVS) concentrates on the implications for monkeys in research, despite the fact that they make up fewer than 1 in 500 research animals. NAVS says the guidelines ‘raise further questions about the suffering of primates in laboratories’.
Well, having read the guidelines, I beg to disagree. Yes, we are all rightly concerned about the welfare of laboratory monkeys. The guidelines do raise the minimum standards for monkey housing. But the UK and one or two other countries already have high housing and welfare standards for monkeys – gang housing is the norm, for instance. Substantial improvements have been made in many institutions in the UK in recent years, not least because funding bodies in the UK have signed up to a new set of guidelines on the accommodation, care and use of monkeys developed by the government’s National Centre for the 3Rs.
So the EU guidelines simply summarise our current concerns about primate welfare, they do not raise further concerns. The effect will be to require a few UK centres to speed up their programmes to upgrade facilities, and to require all the other EU countries to come up to the same standard (which will be a much greater step up for some of them).
Ironically, the proposed University of Cambridge primate neuroscience centre, which was scuppered partly by vociferous animal rights campaigning, would have provided first class housing for these research animals.
Across the board, cage sizes in the new guidelines are larger than the old EU sizes, but UK research centres have long exceeded minimum UK and EU requirements for all species. The only two areas which may be a challenge in the UK are stocking densities for large rats (ie fewer older rats per cage) and more height for rabbits. Rabbits will almost certainly need to be housed in floor pens rather than cages. Anyone who has visited a UK animal house recently will know that this is already quite common. But the significant numbers of rats and rabbits used in research (414,335 and 15,348 in the UK in 2005) mean that it’s probably more of a challenge than upgrading one or two monkey houses.
