Labs Scurry To Meet Animal Care Mandate

USDA's deadline nears, and scientists struggle to reconcile their research priorities with new regulations Laboratories throughout the United States that use animals for research are rushing to meet new federal regulations affecting the welfare of animals used for research. The regulations cover exercise for dogs, improved housing for cats, and the psychological well-being of nonhuman primates. The rules require labs to have on hand, ready for inspection, plans that comply with these regulations by August 14. Issued in February by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the regulations represent the culmination of years of bureaucratic tussling and angry exchanges between animal-rights forces and scientists who use animals in research. The new rules were adopted to comply with amendments to the Animal Welfare Act that were passed by Congress in 1985. U.S. laboratories will have until 1994 to implement all of the physical and procedural changes in their plans. While much of the new regulations is nonspecific and subject to interpretation by individual laboratories and institutions, the USDA rules provide minimum standards for dogs' exercise areas and the living spaces provided for dogs, cats, and primates (see story on page 6). Scientists and lab administrators in general say they are pleased that the regulations, revised extensively after the USDA first proposed them in 1987, allow them considerable flexibility in deciding how to implement the requirements. For example, the rules direct labs to improve opportunities for social interaction among primates, but do not mandate specific aspects of that care, such as exact cage size. "It's a matter of being able to say, `Here are the things we are doing to enrich this animal's environment, and here's why,' rather than simply being required to put a rubber ball and a mirror in every cage," says Christine M. Parks, associate director of the animal care department at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. "And that certainly makes more sense." While the United States Department of Agriculture requires laboratories and other research animal-housing facilities to draw up their own specific plans for complying with its new animal-welfare regulations' general intent, the agency does set some specific bottom-line standards. For example, dogs housed individually in areas less than two times the size of a certain minimum area must be allowed to exercise regularly, outside their pens or cages. The size in square inches of an individual dog's minimum living space is determined by adding six to the dog's length in inches, from nose to tail, then squaring that number. The minimum area of a cat's living space is determined by the cat's weight, and the enclosure must be at least two feet high. Pens housing groups of cats must contain enough dry resting spaces elevated above the floor to seat all resident cats comfortably at one time. All primates that would live in social groupings in the wild must have the opportunity for social interaction in their regular laboratory living spaces. Animals proved to be incompatible with others or those with contagious diseases are to be housed individually, but must be able to see and hear other similar primates, unless this would be dangerous for them. Any cage or pen in which a primate is kept must contain toys, food, or other objects that the animal can manipulate as it would objects in its natural environment. --M.C. Despite having that flexibility, many scientists remain concerned about the ultimate cost of meeting the new rules. They also wonder if they are being asked to make judgments about the state of animals' psyches that go beyond existing knowledge of animal behavior. "The rules require us to provide `psychological enrichment' for primates," says Parks. "What the hell does that mean? As people draw up the plans, they're trying to get these terms down to something we can measure." Justification Needed But members of the animal care committees that are drawing up the laboratory plans at each institution warn their colleagues not to become paralyzed by debates over semantics. The point of the new regulations, they say, is obvious: to show the public that institutions can provide a humane home for research animals. "We have to be careful not to define `psychological well-being' in a purely physiological way, when it's quite clear that the law means something like `happiness' here," says Richard Haynes, a philosophy professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, who serves as a member of the school's animal care committee. "Institutions will have to justify their interpretations of the legislation to critics. It's important that we have an interpretation that's not just plausible to scientists, but also defensible in terms of public attitudes." When the proposed regulations were first circulated, some scientists feared that they might stifle research altogether. Ironically, the final rules seem more likely to stimulate additional work on the psychological states of animals used as research subjects. Even those who believe that it is possible to measure an animal's psychological well-being, for instance, say that current research is raising as many questions as it answers. "Even our experts can't agree on good yardsticks for psychological determinations," says Peter Gerone, director of the Tulane Regional Primate Research Center in New Orleans. "Some of our monkeys who are housed outdoors were trained to come in for their blood samples. Having this as part of their regular routine, rather than having to be caught each time, seemed like a good idea to lower their stress levels. And to look at them, they seemed calm. "But when we measured a supposedly stress-indicating hormone in the trained monkeys and in monkeys that had to be captured," Gerone adds, "the nontrained animals showed lower levels. That's the kind of thing we're finding out. It opens up whole new areas of questions." Big Price Tags The cost of research into the perplexing realm of animal behavior and emotion is just one of several new expenses spawned by the regulations, scientists say. New types of housing and other equipment have big price tags. And providing individualized programs for each species--and, in some cases, for individual animals--will require more time spent on planning and record-keeping. While some officials had hoped that institutions would be able to share much of the work of drawing up the plans, many scientists now say that the differences between species and between the kind of work done by different labs make such collaborative efforts nearly impossible. "There are just no universal rules," says Scott Line, a veterinarian doing primate-behavior research at the California Primate Center in Davis. "There are tremendous variations between and even within species, depending on the animals' personalities and how they were raised." The result, say Line and others, is that each lab must study its own animals carefully before drawing up its plans. Some researchers have already tried to profit from the new regulations by developing and selling equipment designed to enrich the environment of caged monkeys. But many lab officials feel that what's been developed so far doesn't please most animals or their human caretakers. "There are toys [on the market]," says Tulane's Gerone. "But, in general, if something turns up in an animal's cage and he can't eat it or sexually abuse it, he'll get bored pretty quickly and throw it away." The enrichment materials available now are "pretty much unsatisfactory," says Howard Rush, associate professor of laboratory animal medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. As a result, Rush spends much of his time looking for new and better ways to enrich cage environments. The best solution so far, he says, are foraging boards, fur-covered objects under which lab workers bury food. But the boards are far from perfect, Rush admits. "At $200 apiece, we can't afford one for each cage," he says. "And they're also hell to maintain. They get dirty quickly--imagine sugary food embedded in fur--and they're hard to sanitize." Rush says that one answer to the environment-enrichment question might be the task-oriented feeding that some primates in his lab engage in. Under such a regimen, the animals come out of their cages and press levers to receive various food treats. "They get lots of interaction with humans and with the monkeys sitting next to them," he says, "plus the very important element of being able to control whether they receive food or not. But while this system works beautifully for some scientific studies [for example, with monkeys that press levers in response to hearing tones], we haven't figured out whether we could make it available to all monkeys." Although few labs have made firm estimates of their plans' costs, it's clear that foraging boards are not the only high-priced items on their agenda. Oregon's Parks says that each of the paired cages for primates that her university would like to purchase is priced at $2,600. Jackie D. Wood, chairman of the physiology department at the Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus, projects a bill of $250,000 for dog runs--areas in which dogs can move about freely without being in the care of individual handlers--in one of the college's two live animal centers. Even that price, Wood says, is lower than the alternative: paying workers to walk the dogs regularly. Paperwork Expands Stephen P. Kelley, chief of laboratory animal medicine at the Oregon Regional Primate Center in Portland, says he plans to spend $50,000 just on cage toys and similar manipulative devices. Even more costly, he says, will be the time he and other veterinarians must devote to the paperwork associated with the complicated new rules. "In the 15 years I've been in the field, regulations have mushroomed," he says, referring to the increase in the number of rules that now must be followed. "I spend about 50 percent of my time now doing compliance paperwork. That's up from about 20 percent. That's an extra 30 percent of my time that I'm not spending on animal care." For some lab officials, the biggest question is whether they will be able to afford to meet the new procedures being drawn up. "Where is all this money going to come from?" says Jorge Velasco, associate director of laboratory animals at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "Animal research was already becoming substantially more expensive. You've got to ask whether these added costs won't harm research more than they help animals." Thomas Hamm, chairman of the comparative medicine department at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, Calif., contends that the animal-rights movement has forced upon the public an outdated and inaccurate caricature of animal laboratories as inhumane facilities where fuzzy creatures are crowded together in filthy cages, awaiting the day when they will be taken out and tortured. "It's a picture that may have been true 30 years ago," Hamm says. "And somewhere on the planet there may still be some dogs in little, tiny cages that are never let out or talked to. But the great majority of institutions today make great efforts to care for their animals." Moreover, Hamm warns scientists not to assume that these new rules constitute the final word on the care of laboratory subjects. "Allowing labs to draw up their own compliance plans was a positive step in many ways," he says. "But what happens when a judge and jury have to settle a lawsuit? If my cage was supposed to be 19.2 inches wide, a layperson can easily determine whether it is or it isn't. But the new standards require them to weigh the claims of scientists against the animal-rights forces' appeals to sentimentality." Even so, says Florida's Haynes, the drive to improve the conditions of laboratory animals stems in part from a failure of scientists to recognize that the public has legitimate questions that must be addressed. "It's all very well for scientists who use animal research to claim they know best about the animals' welfare," Haynes says. "But if the public's concern over pain and distress in lab animals is really based on [their] lack of knowledge, then it's up to the scientists to inform them and engage them in dialogue."

Labs Scurry To Meet Animal Care Mandate

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