The justification and responsibility of researchers in the ethical assessments of animal experiments

Abstract

In the Netherlands, all animal experiments involving vertebrate animals must be approved by an accredited Animal Ethics Committee (AEC, or, in Dutch: DEC). Researchers who are planning to carry out an animal experiment, need to submit an inquiry form to the DEC. The information in the inquiry form will be used by the DEC to decide if an animal experiment may be carried out. Since the end of 2011, the DEC Utrecht has added a new section to its inquiry form. In this section, the researcher is being asked to make his own ethical assessment of the experiment. This new section has been added to the inquiry form in order to promote the researcher’s awareness of the importance of the wellbeing of the involved animals and to let him critically think about the ethical aspects of the planned experiment. The goal of this study was to determine, based on literature, what should be included in the researcher’s ethical assessment and to compare this to what researchers themselves had filled in. A scoring sheet was created to quantify to what extent the researcher’s own ethical assessments complied with what should minimally be in it. Only a very small amount of the ethical assessments (5%) complied with the criteria of what minimally should be in it. This could be due to the fact that all aspects that should be in the ethical assessment already need to be mentioned elsewhere in the inquiry form: the researcher might not feel the need to explicitly mention these aspects again. Also, clear directions for what should be in the own ethical assessment are missing in the form. The addition of the ‘own ethical assessment’ is an improvement of the inquiry form in the way that it makes an appeal to the responsibility of the researcher. Ultimately, it is the DEC that decides if an experiment can be judged as ethically acceptable, but with the ‘own ethical assessment’ we place part of the responsibility with the researcher. The inquiry form of the DEC Utrecht could be further improved by implementing clear directions of what should be in the own ethical assessment of researchers. This would probably significantly decrease the current discrepancy between what should be in the ethical assessment and what researchers fill in themselves.