This isn’t an area that we typically discuss, but this humorous Don Mayne cartoon will be excruciatingly familiar for anyone that has tried to provide technology, or process advice over the phone. It is a good reason to have familiar and dedicated support people available, rather than busy staff who try to fit it around their other work and so end up rushing and making a bad job of their explanations.
This discussion about animal welfare, animal ethics committees and the discharge public trust, is very much a rip in the frame of the approach in the United States. Nonetheless, it raises important questions for other jurisdictions. Are committees checking applications for bureaucratic compliance or are they genuinely discharging the public trust? We need a process to test this involves public input and oversight.
Superficially, we might think that drones are a way to cheaply and safely reach remote locations, they are a way to collect data about animals safely and without potential harm to anybody, but this Australian work and this Times Higher Education suggest that such assumptions are wrong. Drones are causing harm and institutions that have ethics guidelines on their correct use.
The use of octopi in animal laboratory research raises interesting opportunities, as well as significant ethical questions. Many national animal ethics standards globally (including Australia) recognise that octopi are sentient, with complex cognitive capacity and require scientific work with them to be submitted for research ethics review by an animal ethics committee.
Most national Human Research Ethics arrangements/codes treat reimbursements and incentives quite differently. Incentives are permissible as long as they are not coercive – especially if they might encourage a person to expose themselves to a risk that they might otherwise avoid. You institutional guidance material should assist researchers to identify the difference between reimbursements and incentives, and to judge whether an incentive is coercive.
Discussions about animal welfare in research can tend to evoke strident and forceful opposing positions, as highlighted by this story and the public commentary the display generated. What is needed is calm and open discussion, based on the principles of transparency, respect, empathy and respect.
Obviously, rather than animals that have been operated on suffer, they are humanely euthanised, but as shown in this Don Mayne cartoon, it is fun to imagine retired lab rats in a nursing home compare the severity of the surgical procedures they endured.
Depending on your views on animal research and your sympathies for the challenges of animal breeding, housing and handling, this move in Germany might be viewed as something for other jurisdictions to adopt, or a scary impediment to work in this area. It does reflect evolving community views with regards to transparency and accountability in animal-based work.
