ETHICS IN ANIMAL RESEARCH

Scientists undoubtedly owe their great advances and knowledge in biomedical

research to millions of animals which they use in often painful and distressing
procedures. Hence, one of the most important issues in scientific research is to
consider ethics in animal research. Approval for use of animals should be
sought according to the following steps:

Will the animal be

YES alive when you use NO
it?

Will the animal be

manipulated acc. to the
Animal Welfare Act (1999) NO

YES

Is the animal going to be NO Ethics approval is

used for the purposes of
NOT required
teaching, research,
experimentation or drug
trials?

Ethics approval
YES
IS required
The main principles in this context correspond to the ‘3Rs’ concept
as defined by Russell and Brand in 1959 which is outlined below:

ANIMAL
EXPERIMENTS

REPLACE REDUCE REFINE

Animal experiments Only the number of The study must be

must be replaced animals required to refined to reduce
wherever possible obtain reliable data its overall impact
by other methods in an experiment on animal use
(modelling, in vitro must be used
systems)