One of the purposes of the Animal Welfare Act is to address “public concerns for laboratory animal care and treatment to help assure that research will continue to progress”. Stress levels promulgated by the USDA exist to help categorize research for better public understanding. Animal Welfare Regulations define stress levels to classify experiments on the basis of the research design and the possible outcomes of the experiment on animal well-being. Spontaneous events unrelated to the project should not be used to define the research stress level, because they are indefinable and limitless.
In this example, the rabbit was not involved in an experiment directly designed to cause unrelieved pain, but being a model for a type of bone abnormality warrants the reasonable possibility of pain. Although the animal did experience pain as a result of the accidental injury and there was a delay of 30 minutes, this should not be defined as category E—“animals upon which teaching, experiments, research, surgery, or tests were conducted involving accompanying pain or distress to the animals and for which the use of appropriate anesthetic, analgesic, or tranquilizing drugs would have adversely affected the procedures, results, or interpretations of the teaching, research, experiments, surgery, or tests”—because appropriate pain-relieving drugs were given to this rabbit in a timely manner.
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