On the other hand, veterinarians in companion animal practice collaborate with animal guardians or owners, devoting time and effort to diagnose the individual household animal. Their goal is to generate data, even at the cost of causing pain in their animals, not to manage their research animals as clinical patients. The data they report may generalize to other species, especially humans. Their tools are efficient, quantifiable, reproducible. Pain biologists have refined methods for performing analgesiometry, i.e., measuring pain in animals, especially rodents (Mogil, 2019). All of this is extra challenging if human presence suppresses the pain behaviors they are trying to monitor. Veterinarians and animal caregivers must also monitor for spontaneous pain separate from what the experiments causes, such as fight wounds, cage injuries, and a variety of illnesses animals may develop as they live and age in the vivarium. They must work with their ethics committee and veterinarian to assess the likely severity for the animals of experiments they are planning, to plan for preemptive pain management, and to monitor animal welfare during an experiment. Scientists in other fields may also induce pain, but as an unwanted contingency, a side-effect of the experiments they are performing (Russell & Burch, 1959). Pain biologists using mice to model human pain need accurate, reproducible analgesiometric methods to quantify pain-often pain that they have induced-and the relief that experimental analgesics they are testing provide.
Three overlapping communities have a stake in accurate mouse pain diagnosis in the laboratory. On the other hand, if prey species are easily diagnosed when painful, or by contrast, if all animals challenge easy pain diagnosis, different ethical norms will follow. All scientists who work with animals must receive training on pain assessment strategies that are not confounded by pain-masking behaviors, if there are any. Veterinarians and animal ethics committees must factor in the likelihood of under-diagnosed animal pain in their protocol reviews and pain management plans. Pain biologists must factor this into their measurements of animal pain or shift their studies to “non prey” species, if such exist, that are less deceptive. If mice, rabbits, sheep or others truly hide signs of pain from humans they perceive as dangerous predators, there are important implications for practice. It is essential to conduct an ethical reckoning of what to do when the facts about animal suffering are limited and uncertain (Carbone, 2019 Institute for Laboratory Animal Research, 2011). It is essential to have the most accurate facts about the animals to aim for the most ethical (animal) cost / (human) benefit balance. In this article, I ask if this claim about prey species’ pain manifestation is true, and what ethical implications for practice should follow from deciding on its truth. When this happens, pain scientists record incorrect data, or scientists withhold the analgesic medicines that might help the mouse feel better, or the veterinarian tells the researcher to continue with their animal experiments, all the while assuring the ethics committee, incorrectly, that the experiments are going well and need no further refinement. You approach the cage, the mouse does her best to look fit and strong, and you wrongly assume she’s not in pain. The challenge, some authors warn, is that mice and other “prey species” may hide or mask their pain (Dwyer, 2004 Malik & Leach, 2017 Allweller, 2019 McLennan et al., 2019 Mogil, 2019 Turner, Pang & Lofgren, 2019 WIRES Northern Rivers, 2020).
#Predator vs prey animals how to#
As a veterinarian with an interest in laboratory animal pain management, I have read articles and reviewed manuscripts on how to diagnose a mouse in pain.
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