The very first thing that hits me as I enter the Soviet-era medical research facility is the stench that I can immediately recognize. Our guide, a senior scientist in his early 60s, greets us and explains that it is the vivarium. Being originally from this geography, I am very familiar with the expression on his face: that of a person who knows very well that things should be different, a person who has seen things being different but feels powerless to bring the necessary change about. What I do not yet know is what is waiting for me inside the vivarium.
For a moment, though, this research facility brings back childhood memories of Soviet-era public buildings: long, dimly lit corridors giving way to glorified, wide, sunny staircases ornamented with plants, leading back to another set of dark corridors, with occasional walls decorated with beautiful colorful tile mosaics, much like the ones we had in the animal research facility back in the Netherlands, where I spent my last four years doing auditory research on mice. On the surface, the only difference between the two buildings is the decades of missing maintenance work in the former. The fall of the USSR left this institute, along with many others, with no funds for decades. Shock therapy and deindustrialization that ensued plunged the country into deep poverty, forcing institutions to cut corners until no corner was left to cut. On top of that, the right-wing governments that came to dominate the political scene oversaw the demise of cultural and scientific institutions and the massive exodus of qualified scientific workers from the country. Now considered unimportant in the era of privatization, commerce and consumerism, scientific research institutions that were once held in esteem were left to their inevitable decay.
Back at the entrance, I ask if we can have a tour of the vivarium. Our guide reluctantly agrees and introduces us to the head animal caretaker in a white coat, who we later learn to be a jeweler by training, much to our surprise. We enter the corridor tiled with sky blue tiles with many rooms to the left and right. Inside every room, we see improvised cages with rusty lids. Coming closer we are overwhelmed by the scene in front of us: cages are full of mice, rats, and rabbits, with no place to move, bedding that has probably never been replaced, and rotting pieces of bread lying nearby in the open air. In addition to the sheer number of animals crammed into the space, we are struck by the rust accumulated on the cage lids over what looks like decades of use, how some animals, visibly sick, seemingly tried to get away from the rest by hanging from them. Before we manage to recover from the scene, I see the head animal caretaker flick a mouse, which seems to have managed to miraculously climb the wall of a tall box, back to the cage. It was at this point that I started to wonder who was more affected by the shock therapy, us or these poor animals. In a country ravaged by brutal wars, with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people living in abject poverty for decades, that says something.
Now back in the Netherlands, I suddenly have an external perspective that makes me painfully aware of the fragility of institutional regulations that we often for granted and see as mere limitations. “Yes, yes, animals have intrinsic value and they can feel pain, so we should not cause unnecessary pain and suffering to them, 3Rs, etc. Now, can we actually do our research, please?” is not an unusual attitude to develop for a researcher who has to contend with strict animal research regulations that are now prevalent in Europe. Inside our clean, well-maintained research facilities we tend to take it for granted that there will always be plenty of bedding material, clean cages, water bottles, food pellets, and qualified people running the place. For someone who has never seen the other side of the institutional collapse, ethics can easily become a theoretical concern to think about from proposal to proposal. No amount of FELASA training can replace, I argue, the lived experience of seeing what can and does happen when institutional dependencies collapse.
More importantly, though, this experience brings a particular distinction to a sharp focus for me; I will call this distinction between lines and arrows. Conversations about animal experimentation and ethics can often devolve into simplistic conclusions like “if bad, then ban”. However, the legalistic approaches aiming to draw strict lines defining what is ethical and what is not often fail to have a correspondingly solid, clear-cut ethical argumentation behind them, despite coming from a morally good place. Indeed, one could argue that the legal lines we draw are always practical in nature, not theoretically bulletproof. As is the case with many true ethical dilemmas, ethical problems surrounding animal experimentation, too, do not have clear-cut solutions. They can, however, be approached. In other words, even if there is no clear argument for outright banning animal experimentation on ethical grounds, we can still acknowledge and address the underlying issues. This requires a dynamic conception of animal ethics that values proactive engagement with animal welfare rather than simply relying on arbitrary lines that institutional actors with lesser means often fail to reach.
The 3R principles (replace, reduce, and refine) reflect just such an attitude. From the start, being action verbs, they promote a certain dynamic, proactive sensibility. In this approach, the researcher is invited to explore alternatives such as cell lines, organoids, or in silico experiments to reduce the number of animals used in the experiments and refine the experimental procedures to cause the least amount of suffering. In neuroscience, for example, 3R’s approach encourages exploration of more ethologically valid naturalistic behaviors that do not require reducing the mobility of the animal, adoption of modern high-throughput recording techniques that reduce the necessity for using a large number of animals, and usage of advanced behavioral tracking methods to better monitor the animal’s welfare both in- and outside of the experimental setup to track animal’s welfare and react quickly to adverse situations. In other words, taking ethical concerns seriously and adopting a proactive attitude towards them can be a productive force in developing more cutting-edge research programs and practices. However, while some institutions can adopt novel techniques in a short amount of time, for others, it will take years. Therefore, adopting the approach that weighs change more than the absolute place on a scale is critical for the steady improvement of animal welfare, without setting prohibitive barriers in front of participation in science across the world. Instead of drawing lines that can not be easily reached by underfunded institutions like the one I visited, we could promote a proactive approach of constant vigilance toward animal suffering and quality of life. In the long run, this will improve the quality of the science we do across the world not just because it will be more inclusive, but also because happy animals enable superior science. This is, in a nutshell, what we could call an arrows approach to ethics.
Such a proactive stance was what was missing back home. Having heard some harrowing stories of surgery practices and having seen the tip of the iceberg down at the vivarium, I offered our guide a few simple changes that could easily be implemented with what little is available to them. In addition, I offered to connect them with relevant people who could guide them, should they want some external counsel. Though sympathetic to the idea, and well aware of the fact that things need to change, our guide was pessimistic about the feasibility of even the basic improvements. Despite acknowledging the dire state of the facility and noting the amount of variability in data that can be directly linked to the conditions therein, he is not hopeful that anything will change. The lines system in animal ethics quite frequently forces scientists like him from less well-off institutes to misrepresent their research practices to tick necessary boxes. Since this approach requires the achievement of minimums rather than encouraging change, the value of making piecemeal improvements can remain underappreciated. Indeed, 6 months into my visit, I am still waiting to hear from our guide or hear any update from the institution. However, in the meantime, consistent with my self-professed approach to addressing ethical issues through small, steady steps, I am escalating my efforts into addressing this state of the matters by sharing the story of this fateful visit, first with friends, then with a group of my students, and now with a broader audience.