The Online Edition of the Annandale High School Newspaper.

The A-Blast

The Online Edition of the Annandale High School Newspaper.

The A-Blast

The Online Edition of the Annandale High School Newspaper.

The A-Blast

Full Interview with USDA

Full+Interview+with+USDA

Q: According to the animal welfare act, companies that intend to use animals for research, exhibition, or are transporting animals must meet certain requirements. What exactly is the process you use to make sure they do meet the standards?

A: Well, if you are an individual or company that is using animals regulated by the AWA you would need to be either licensed or registered with the USDA. What that means is that if you are transporting, breeding, or using warm-blooded animals in medical research, or if you are exhibiting warm-blooded animals to the public for compensation, you fall under the regulations and guidance of the Animal Welfare Act. By either getting licensed or registered with USDA that allows us to put you on the schedule of routine, unannounced inspections, and that is how we find out if you are properly caring for and handling your animals. That’s the only way we have the authority to come onto your property. So if you are conducting business with animals that are governed by the animal welfare act, we are the federal agency that enforces those standards and regulations. The heart of everything we do is to ensure the welfare of the animals that we regulate, so that is why we inspect them and that’s why this program exists.

Q: What characterizes an experiment as being humane versus inhumane?

A: It’s important to know that the USDA does not tell research facilities what type of research to conduct or what type of experiments to conduct or that sort of thing. Those are business decisions that are made by the facilities themselves. Our authority only goes as far as to ensure the welfare of those animals. I know there are some [people] in the animal rights community that don’t like the fact that animals are used in research, there’s other folks on the other side of the fence, so to speak, that are very much in favor of it because they believe it leads to medical advances and things like that. So what we do as federal regulators, we don’t have an ideological agenda for this issue on one side or the other. These are legal businesses so our authority only goes as far as to make sure they are treating these animals humanely, but we don’t step in and dictate what they can and cannot do. Those decisions, in terms of actual research that is conducted, are made by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which is an ethical oversight committee that has to be part of every research facility, but that is not a USDA committee. [The IACUC] has to approve or disapprove the lab experiments and the animal testing, it’s not the USDA who approves what the companies can and cannot do. What we do when we inspect them in addition to making sure the animals are being treated okay is make sure the researchers in that facility followed the protocol that was established by the ethical oversight committee. As long as they got approval from their oversight committee, which is in their own facility, that is as far as we can go.

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Q: You said that you are the federal agency that enforces the standards, but these are the standards that are set by this Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee?

A: To help clarify, those are the committees at each individual facility that help approve or disapprove the type of research that is conducted. When I say that the USDA enforces the standards set forth in the Animal Welfare Act, the Animal Welfare Act doesn’t list the types of research that can be okay-ed or not okay-ed, what it does is set broad standards and regulations for the care and treatment of the animals. So, unless this experiment is otherwise noted, in terms of getting a specific result for the experiment itself, those regulations in the Animal Welfare Act will only cover things such as ‘Are the animals getting proper food and water?’, ‘Are the animals in a proper cage or enclosure space?’, ‘Are the animals protected from extremes of temperature and weather?’, ‘Are you separating species so that the hunted species are not encaged near the hunters?’ Those kind of day-to-day care standards, that’s what the Animal Welfare Act does, but it doesn’t get into the actual research that is being conducted, simply the care of the animals that are being experimented on.

Q: In many testing facilities, animals aren’t given medication for pain relief for the tests they are undergoing so does that fall under the category of an aspect of the test itself? Or is it part of the regulation?

A: For painful and pain-free experiments the regulation simply states that you must make an effort to find pain-free alternatives, but it does not say you are not allowed to conduct experiments that involve some type of discomfort for animals. It’s worded, again, so that the USDA as far as animal welfare goes is not the body that decides. But if they are doing an experiment they have to make a reasonable effort to find an alternative.

Q: Why are birds, rats, mice, and other rodents not included or protected under the Animal Welfare Act?

A: There is potential legislation, because you can’t just change the Animal Welfare Act, for federal rule-making you have to first, you know, put out the proposal and then the public has to be given a certain amount of time to make comments about it and then it comes back to the agency and they look at it and all the comments and they re-put it out there, so it’s a big long process. That process has begun, so as of right now perhaps birds and mice and rats are not covered under the Animal Welfare Act. But the vast majority of the animals used in the testing are rabbits and mice.

Q: What are the minimum standards for the condition of each animal? Are they specific to the species? How were they established?

A: The Animal Welfare Act does not break things down by species for the most part, so the only people who are allowed to inspect research facilities are veterinary medical officials. These are USDA veterinary officials that do the inspections and the short answer is that they know what the standards and what the humane treatment is. So when you apply for registration the interview inspector is going to make sure you have knowledge of the species of animals you are using and they are certainly going to inspect that way and hold you to the standards. It’s not a document that spells things out to the letter, such as, ‘If you’re conducting such and such caFor the inspection process out veterinarians will certainly know how to apply the regulation to whichever facility they are at. So if they look at those type of animals that are there and a part of that experiment there, they are gonna know what is humane treatment and what is not. That’s as concise of an answer as I can give you. It’s not a dictionary so to speak that gives an exact definition for each animal. It has to be a general regulation to cover all research. That’s pretty standard, but our veterinarians certainly know what they are looking for.

 

 

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Full Interview with USDA