Animal ethics

• Caging

  Researchers must consider the social needs of the animal and caging must be appropriate for the species.
• Pain and suffering

  Pain suffering and distress must be kept to a minimum whilst still achieving the aims of the research
• Speciesism

  Must make sure one species isn’t discriminating against another for its own benefit as it is morally wrong to treat animals differently to humans.
• Sentience

  The BPS states that the level of sentience that the animal has needs to be considered. Any animal that has a CNS is considered to be sentient.
• Refine

  The way in which the experiment is carried out should minimise pain and distress caused to the animal
• Replace

  Do animals need to be used? Could it be replaced by the use of anything else?
• Reduce

  Number of animals should be kept to a minimum with the maximum possible information gathered from the animals used
• Generalisability (animals)

  Animal physiology may be too different to tell us anything useful about humans.
• Behavioural continuity (animals)

  Most animals mature and breed faster than humans so this allows researchers to study causes and effects on behaviour much quicker
• Availability (animals)

  Animals may be available in larger numbers so larger volumes of data can be gathered much quicker
• Not possible on humans (animals)

  Some areas of research such as brain lesions isn’t possible on humans so it’s done on animals to test the impact of damaging different brain areas on behaviour
• Anthropomorphism (animals)

  Possibility of attributing animals with human characteristics such as emotion, since animals don’t feel human emotion
• Memorise these animal studies

  Pavlov

  Skinners rats

  Skinners pidgeons

  Olds and Milner reward pathways

  Rat park

  Sheridan and king
• Arguments for and against animal use

  IN CONTEXT!! [] - context examples

  • Animal research can easily be controlled [such as dosage of alcohol given to rats]
  • Some research can't be ethically carried out in humans [such as administering alcohol to pregnant people] so appropriate to test it on rats
  • Animals have different brain structures to humans so findings [about context ] may not be representative of humans lowering generalisability