Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees

You are a professor at a university. How do you get permission to use animals in your teaching and research? What standards are employed to assess whether that use is acceptable? This chapter answers those questions, and in so doing, serves as an introduction to some ethical issues associated with institutional animal care and use committees. In particular, the chapter considers whether common uses of animals would pass the test if the committees’ own standards were applied more rigorously. The answer, it seems, is: probably not. And once we understand why, we can see the value of having a wider range of perspectives involved in the vetting of animal use.