National Antivisection Society
Laboratory animal housing issues
The current guidelines on lab animal welfare, spelt out in the ‘Code of Practice for the Housing and Care of Laboratory Animals’ (COP), are ineffectual, and routinely ignored anyway. Consequently, the majority of laboratory animals spend their lives stacked in cages little bigger than shoe boxes. There is little or nothing to amuse the animals; accommodation is designed purely for convenience of laboratory personnel with little if any thought given to the animal’s needs.
One researcher at Oxford University had even managed to cram 16 mice into the same small box.
A minor and common accident that NAVS Field Officers have regularly encountered in animal laboratories is known as “run-out": The water bottles inside rodent cages leak or accidentally empty, flooding the cage of rats or mice. The animals are left wet and cold, and what bedding they have is soaking - often such animals do not survive.
Rodents are even mutilated to make identification easy. Without anaesthetic, toes or tips of tails are snipped off with scissors, or holes are punched through ears.
For some species, COP is a little more detailed. For dogs, it is said that: “Bedding and nesting material should be provided unless it is clearly inappropriate". In over ten years studying UK laboratories, the NAVS has yet to find a laboratory which provides its dogs with bedding. Certainly not SmithKline Beecham, nor Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School, nor Toxicol/Quintiles Laboratories, not even the licensed lab animal dealer, Harlan Interfauna. These animals live out their lives in a barren pen with a concrete floor and a scattering of sawdust.
Although rudimentary, there are more guidelines under the COP for the housing of other primates, than any other species. Yet, for the tamarin monkeys at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, almost every guideline was ignored. When the NAVS exposed this at the time, the Home Office promised to act.
However, two years later, and just a few miles away at the Institute of Neurology, we found macaque monkeys alone in small cages with no dimensions measuring more than a few feet; no bedding, no foraging materials, virtually no furniture, and harsh metal grid floors.
Little wonder one poor monkey at the Institute of Neurology, Alice, had gone out of her mind. She performed stereotypic behaviour, repeatedly circled her cage with her head hanging to one side. Her sides were also raw with injuries. The Institute claimed her injuries were from cage mates at the laboratory that sold her and that she had arrived in this disturbed state. She had been sold to the Institute by another British laboratory - Cambridge University.
It is said that licences to experiment on animals are only awarded to establishments which meet the guidelines in the COP - evidence collected by the NAVS has repeatedly shown that this is simply not true.
Laboratory Animal Supply
Experimenters regularly claim that animals in UK laboratories come from licensed suppliers. Yet in a year over a thousand animals may come from non-licensed sources, or are supplied by middlemen. Since we have shown that husbandry guidelines can be ignored with impunity, having a licence and a Home Office stamp of approval is almost meaningless.
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