The BPS guidelines

• 1

  • The British Psychological Society (BPS) issues guidelines for when psychologists are working with non-human animals to minimise ethical issues being met
  • One of these guidelines is to follow the 3Rs principle, which was introduced by Russell and Birch (1959)
  • These stand for replace, reduce and refine
  • Meaning that when conducting research on non-human animals’ psychologists should aim to replace the use of animals with alternatives wherever possible
  • reduce the number of animals that re-used within the research and ensure the procedures are refined to minimise suffering
• 2

  • Other BPS guidelines include ensuring care for the animals beyond study periods and considering the animals' prior experiences
• 3 - Counter

  • However, these are just guidelines and are not a legal requirement so it could be argued that they do not afford non-human animals enough protection from unethical research
  • For example, each year 400 million animals are experimented on (UK home office statistics, 2009) and the few breakthroughs that occur are often at the expense of the animals