October 5, 2000
		USDA Offers Protections to Laboratory Animals Animal Rights advocates (and some of the most abused animals they are trying to protect) have scored a major victory as the U.S. Department of Agriculture has granted legal protection to mice, rats and birds under the Animal Welfare Act. The agreement with an animal rights group, Alternatives Research & Development Foundation (ARDF), that sued the agency in 1999, will require legal standards for food, water, housing and pain relief for laboratory animals. It will also require scientists to consider alternatives to the use of rats, mice and birds "I believe this proposed settlement is a reasonable resolution of this case," said Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman. "By initiating rulemaking, we ensure an open process with significant opportunity for public input ... I would strongly urge interested parties to actively participate in the rulemaking process to ensure that all points of view are fairly represented." John McArdle, director of the ARDF, said the goal of the settlement is to promote the use of alternatives in animal research. Johns Hopkins University, which tried to intervene in the suit on behalf of the biomedical research community, says the increased regulation will make laboratory experiments with these animals virtually impossible to conduct. Researchers at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere complain that the bureaucracy involved in getting approval for an experiment under these new rules will hold up their work. According to the National Association for Biomedical Research, rats and mice – and to a lesser extent birds – are widely used in research. In its court filing, Johns Hopkins said: "Keeping such individualized written records on the many thousands of mice, rats and birds at Hopkins to comply with USDA regulations designed for other species would be virtually impractical, and probably impossible; would greatly increase the financial and personnel burden on Hopkins' research; and [would] undermine the cost-based reasons for using animals in research. Animal rights groups counter that in European research "powerhouses" such as England, France and Germany, the use of these animals has always been regulated and the countries have no problem maintaining world class research programs. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 defined protections of warm-blooded animals, but excluded rats, mice and birds. When the act was revised in 1985 it didn't alter the exclusionary language. It did however require research institutions that use lab animals to establish committees to oversee and approve of proposed experiments. Some 23 million rats and mice were used in 1999 and made up 95 percent of all laboratory animals.. Those numbers are expected to grow by 50 percent in the next three to five years – with the animals used in genetic testing leading the pack. Hopefully, this new ruling will help reverse this trend, and force scientists to find more ways to conduct medical research that don't involve animals at all.