Are Smelly Animals Happy Animals?
Competing Definitions of Laboratory Animal Cruelty and Public Policy

Julian McAllister Groves 1
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Regulations surrounding laboratory animal care have tried to address aspects of an image of laboratory animal cruelty publicized by animal rights activists. This image of cruelty, however, is not consistent with the experiences of those charged with the day-to-day care of laboratory animals. This article examines the incongruities between the public image of cruelty to animals in laboratories as promoted by animal rights activists, and the experiences of laboratory animal care staff who apply and enforce laboratory animal care regulations. In doing so, the article illuminates why regulations surrounding laboratory animal care are difficult to comply with on the part of the policy enforcers, and are continuously contested by both animal rights activists and animal research personnel.

This article examines the public and professional images of cruelty to animals in biomedical research, and the problems faced by policy enforcers acting upon these images. While many animal rights activists want to abolish all animal research, they have promoted an image of animal cruelty that focuses on certain types of laboratory animal abuse. This has resulted in the enactment of a number of federal, state and institutional regulations to protect laboratory animals from such abuse, without making animal research illegal. Despite these regulations, there are few cases in which researchers have been successfully prosecuted for cruelty to animals in research. Those cases that do go to court or to commissioner's hearings are rarely straightforward. Judges often either drop, overturn or reduce the charges.

I argue that current legislation surrounding animal care in laboratories has been unable to address the problem of animal cruelty as animal rights activists and legislators have defined it. This is because of the incongruities between the public image of animal cruelty and the everyday situations faced by those who enforce regulations surrounding laboratory animal care.

As with other social problems, claims about animal cruelty are not directly the result of an objective condition, but reflect the activities of claims-makers who shape the image of a problem (Spector and Kitsuse, 1977; Best, 1989). Animal rights activists have publicized an image of animal cruelty in which the victims of cruelty are large numbers of household pets, stolen from owners and tortured by researchers who are driven by profits to do unnecessary research. They have lobbied for more animals to be protected by legislation and greater public oversight of animal research.

The public image of a social problem, however, does not always lend itself to easy solutions, since policy makers face a different reality from those defining the problem. As Loseke (1989) observes, "Policies are not applied to 'images,' they are applied to concrete situations."

According to those who enforce laboratory animal care regulations, certain anthropomorphic depictions of animals do not always result in the most favorable conditions for animals. It is also difficult to draw boundaries between necessary and unnecessary research. Finally, greater public oversight does not always lead to greater reporting of animal abuse, as legislators and animal protectionists believed it would. These experiences encourage a competing image of animal abuse, held by many of those involved in animal research, in which the animal rights activists, welfarists and administrators hinder effective laboratory animal care.

Research Site and Methods
The data for this study come from interviews and participant observations with 20 animal rights activists and 20 principals involved with biomedical research between 1988 and 1992. The study took place in a college town and a neighboring city in a southeastern US state where animal rights activists organized two campaigns against biomedical researchers. The first campaign was a law suit filed against researchers in the college town for failing to disclose animal research proposals to the public. The second campaign was to persuade the public to stop a series of neurological studies on cats in the neighboring city.

Members of a grass-roots animal rights organization allowed me to attend their monthly organization meetings and take part in protests outside the science buildings of the local universities. It was during these occasions that I became a familiar face to many activists, who then allowed me to interview them at their residences. During the interviews I asked animal rights activists to describe what kinds of research they considered acceptable and unacceptable and why. The coordinator of the organization also furnished me with its many publications about animal research.

In response to activists' pressure, researchers, administrators and public relations officers organized symposia and distributed literature to counter the claims of the animal rights activists and defend using animals in biomedical research. During these symposia I met animal researchers, veterinarians and members of committees that review animal research. While the Chairmen of these committees did not let me attend their meetings, they did allow me to attend their biannual "Inspection and Evaluation of the [Animal] Facilities." The university's veterinarian also let me attend his animal care staff meetings, in which participants discussed the problems they faced looking after animals.

Among the 20 animal research personnel that I interviewed were seven research review committee members, including the university's veterinarian. I asked these people to talk about the problems they faced in the day-to-day care of animals and the enforcement of federal and state regulations.

The Animal Rights Definition of Cruelty to Animals in Laboratories
Cruelty to animals in laboratories is not a newly discovered problem. The late nineteenth century witnessed an organized campaign against vivisection in Britain and the United States. This was a time in which animals, along with children, were increasingly becoming the objects of bourgeois sentimentality, reflected by the popularity of pet-keeping. The Victorian anti-vivisectionists protested the infliction of pain upon animals, and more broadly, the way in which family physicians were being transformed into cold-hearted scientists (French, 1975; Turner, 1980; Thomas, 1983; Elston, 1987; Jasper and Nelkin, 1992). One anti-vivisection publication, for example, claimed that "vivisection makes brutes of those who should be kind and humane in the practice of the healing art" (quoted in Turner 1980, p. 97).

The increasing popularity of experimental medicine and its alleged benefits to health dwarfed anti-vivisection sentiment in the early twentieth century. Animal protection organizations turned their attention to establishing animal hospitals, shelters, clinics, rescue leagues, rest homes for work animals and animal cemeteries. They fought for leash laws, sound pet care and humane education in schools (Jasper and Nelkin, 1992).

Attention turned once again to animal research in the 1960s, sparked by a fear in the media of an "animal slave trade," in which household pets were allegedly being stolen for research. Charismatic animal protectionists such as Cleveland Amory began to incorporate animal protection into concerns about the environment. Others, such as Ethel Thurston, raised funds to explore alternatives to using animals as research subjects.

The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a new wave of animal rights groups in the United States, such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), In Defense of Animals, Trans-Species Unlimited and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Their founders, who included Elliot Katz, Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco, capitalized on a number of well-publicized exposures of alleged cruelty in animal research, mostly on cats and primates. In 1981, for instance, PETA activists alerted the public to laboratory animal cruelty with videos of injured monkeys in unsanitary laboratories at the Institute for Behavioral Studies in Silver Spring. In 1984, ALF stole video tapes from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School's head trauma laboratory. Excerpts depicting researchers smoking cigarettes and joking with one another while conducting surgery on partially anesthetized baboons with dirty scalpels networked across the United States on national news.

Jasper and Nelkin (1992) identify two broad ideological influences in the modern animal rights movement: a tendency to anthropomorphize animals (to treat them as humans), and a criticism of "instrumentalism" (a morality which emphasizes means over ends, efficiency and profit over human needs and quality of life). The latter idea harkens back to the environmental, feminist, anti-nuclear and peace protests of the 1960s.

Parallel to the two trends that Jasper and Nelkin observe, the animal rights activists that I met made two kinds of statements about cruelty to animals in laboratories. First, activists described research animals as victims of cruelty. Here activists talked about the relationship between humans and animals, and the sentient status of animals. Second, activists talked about the causes of cruelty. These statements concerned the normative operation of science and society as a whole.

The Victims of Cruelty
Animal rights activists drew most attention to researchers who used animals that they believed were once household pets. Activists in the city that neighbored the college town campaigned for laws to stop pounds selling their cats to the psychologist for his neurological studies - a policy that they pejoratively labeled "pound seizure." Activists believed that these animals had learned to trust humans and that to use them for research violated the human-animal bond. Animal shelters and pounds, they believed, should be "safe havens" for animals, not, in the words of one activist, a "pipeline" to the research community:

I just thought pets...that they trusted humans, and were very trusting. And through no fault of their own, they ended up there [in the laboratory]. And that's not the purpose of the shelter. The purpose of the shelter is sort of like the end of the line for most animals. They should try to reunite them with the owner, and if that's not possible, they should try to place them in an appropriate home. And if that's not possible, they should euthanize them humanely.

Aside from this moralistic position, activists worried that if household pets were used in research, animal dealers might take to the streets or animal shelters in search of lost pets. A publication distributed by the organization showed a number of dogs, isolated in pens. The front page headline stated: "Your Pet Could End Up Here!" Inside it noted that:

Approximately 1.5 million companion animals are stolen each year in the United States - many out of their own yards, in broad daylight!!

The pamphlet warned pet owners:

Don't leave animals unattended in the car or yard, or let them run loose in the neighborhood... Watch for suspicious trucks or vans that suddenly frequent your neighborhood; get their license number, a good description of the color and model, and photographs if possible, and report them to the police.

One activist told me that five of her cats had been stolen by such dealers. Another activist feared that the same fate would befall her cats and they would end up in the laboratory of an animal researcher at her local university.

I just couldn't bear the thought of my cats ending up in his lab, even though they don't go outside. You know, it can happen. You can have a lost pet. That's all there is to it.

A second claim surrounding the victims of animal research was that animals endured prolonged suffering and torture at the hands of researchers. This was based on the assumption that animals, like humans, could experience physical pain and emotional discomfort. Another pamphlet produced by the organization stated:

A common denominator links us; a recognition of animals as feeling, thinking beings, creatures as sensitive to pain, neglect, and exploitation as are the humans who inflict this upon them.

Many activists believed that animal research was among the worst type of animal cruelty because the suffering was greater, and more prolonged. The organization's literature urged one local university to "Stop the torture!" Activists widely distributed a videotape of a dog used by medical students in order to practice surgery. The dog was struggling during the operation. The commentary noted that this was because the dog was insufficiently anesthetized.

A final claim about the victims of cruelty in animal research concerned the excessive numbers of animals that researchers purportedly used. One of the organization's pamphlets claimed that "three animals die every second in American Labs." Activists spent considerable time trying to calculate the numbers of animals used. In these calculations, they were concerned to point out that the official government statistics did not reflect the large number of animals used in biomedical research:

The federal government's APHIS reports verify 865, but this number does not include a lot of animals who are not included in the Animal Welfare Act, such as horses, pigs, goats, ducks, quail, frogs, turtle and fish.

The figure also does not include the numbers of animals used by federal research facilities which are exempt from reporting to APHIS [Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service], such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Wound Lab at Fort Bragg, etc.

The figure does not include animals used in public schools, science fairs, etc. And it does not include those animals used by such facilities as Becton Dickinson, whose annual reports are not listed as North Carolina research reports but are listed under other states - and there is no way to know how many of these there are.

One report commented that "a number of figures were illegible...several documents were missing and there was incorrect reporting [on the part of the University]."

Science and Society
While the activists targeted individual researchers in their campaigns, they did not believe these researchers to be inherently cruel people. That is, they did not see cruelty to be the problem of individuals (Mills, 1959). Rather, they attributed cruel acts to problems in the normative operation of science and the broader society.

Activists believed that many scientists had been driven by the lure of publications and grants to do unnecessary research - research which had already been undertaken by another researcher or research that had no practical application to curing disease. One activist told me:

It's not like people who are deliberately doing the wrong things. It's just that they don't realize what they're doing. It's one thing if you choose to go and rob a bank, and you know it's wrong and you do it anyway. But these people have never thought about the issues and they're not aware of what they're doing. Even researchers who are deliberately doing studies - studies that they know are bad studies and they're just doing it to get their name in print - I understand the pressure to do that. And I guess I feel that if we all have our lives looked at under a microscope, we would all do things that ethically we couldn't support, but practically pragmatically we just do them.

Other activists argued that animal "abuse" resulted from the business-like nature of animal research, in which many parties, such as those who deal in animals and equipment, stood to profit. Another campaigner against the cat researcher explained to me:

I'm talking a multimillion dollar business here. It's not just him and the researchers who want the big grants. It's everything from the breeders on down to the people who sell them their cages and the water dishes. It's just a multimillion dollar business, and anytime you've got the potential for a lot of money, because there's a lot of money at stake in anything, there's going to be abuse. And in this instance, the abuse is on the animals.

Animal rights activists also worried that scientists would be cruel to animals because they were not open to public scrutiny. "Behind closed doors," the activists claimed, researchers would be unaccountable for acts of cruelty. They could not be trusted to regulate their own behaviors - a situation that the activists frequently referred to as "foxes guarding the chicken coup."

Activists believed that lack of oversight on the part of the public would lead to cruelty for another reason: researchers would be "brainwashed" by their colleagues and the ideology of scientific progress at any expense. They needed the public, animal rights activists and trained philosophers to prevent them from becoming too detached from the animals. An activist, who led the campaign against the psychologist who undertook research on cats, gave a name to this condition: "ethical conditioned blindness."

He's just been taught for so long that it was right, that he just can't see that what he's doing is not ethical, not humane. He just has his own mind thought, that it's alright to kill for whatever purpose.

Activists were divided on whether all animal research should be abolished. A few conceded that at least some animal research might be acceptable. They drew boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable research by referring to the public image of animal research as exemplars of the latter. One man believed, for example, that most animal research was undertaken purely for money and prestige. A second type of animal research did appear to be useful, but could be undertaken without animals. A third category was animal research that was both useful and required animals. In many instances, however, he believed that researchers involved in such projects needed to treat the animals more humanely by giving them larger cages, more anesthetics and more interaction with other animals.

Other informants believed that animal research should be abolished, regardless of how humanely researchers treated the animals. They argued that by curbing unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking and eating meat, along with exploring alternative research methods that did not involve animals, biomedical research using animals could be eliminated. To continue with animal research merely distracted researchers from looking for such alternatives.

This position notwithstanding, most of these abolitionists agreed that it was futile to publicly argue for the abolition of all animal research. In the first place, whereas some activists found avenues to negotiate improved living conditions for laboratory animals, they believed that the total abolition of animal research was an unobtainable goal.2

Second, activists also worried that publicly presenting an abolitionist stance would alienate potential supporters, especially sympathetic politicians, who had to gain support from the majority of their constituencies. One activist, who frequently wrote to her local political representatives to protest animal research, explained:

I don't go out and tell a politician that I'm totally against experimentation because the politician is going to support whatever gets the majority's votes. A lot of the issues that they are concerned with, which is the protection of animals, etc., are issues or feelings that the majority of the population have. You stir those feelings, you get a mass voting block, that's what the politician wants. In return, that politician votes down pound seizure. A minor issue to most people, a major issue to your political group.

While privately wanting the abolition of animal research, such activists embraced the public image of laboratory animal cruelty as a means to "stir the public's feelings" about animal research.

The Legal and Experts' Definition of Animal Cruelty
Legislation surrounding the use of animals in biomedical research reflects this compromise position, which addresses the animal rights activists' depictions of cruelty in their public campaigns, without making animal research illegal. For example, the precursor to the 1966 Animal Welfare Act - the first federal statute regarding the use of animals in the United States - was a case involving a stolen dog taken across state lines by animal dealers for sale to a laboratory. Legislators were concerned with protecting cat and dog owners from having their pets stolen by dealers who would sell them to research facilities. The legislation, therefore, only covered facilities that held cats and dogs and required dealers in these animals to obtain licenses from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), keep records of purchases and sales and allow the USDA to undertake inspections of their facilities.

In the 1970s, amendments to the Animal Welfare Act made room for more animals to be covered under its provision, but still excluded rats, mice, birds, horses and farm animals - the majority of animals used in research. The Act also included more regulations about the handling, care and treatment of animals during research and experimentation. It stipulated, for example, "the appropriate use of anesthetic or tranquilizing drugs when such use would be proper in the opinion of the attending veterinarians of such facilities" (quoted in Phillips and Sechzer, 1989, p. 22).

The most recent legislation followed the accusations of laboratory animal cruelty by the newly formed animal rights organizations of the early 1980s. Unlike the previous legislation, the amendments to the Animal Welfare Act in 1985 required that researchers take into account animal pain and distress in their research designs, discourage multiple surgery upon animals, and make provisions for veterinary care, the exercising of dogs and the psychological well-being of primates. The legislation also stipulated that each federally funded animal research institution establish an "Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee" (IACUC) of at least three people (including a veterinarian and a person not affiliated with the institution to represent the broader community) to review all proposed animal research and inspect laboratories for animal abuse. Undoubtedly, this was intended to address the concerns about accountability to the public raised by the animal rights activists.

However, the increasing regulation of animal research was by no means limited to the law and interest groups; it also came from within the research community itself as part of a growing concern with ethical issues in science, and the waning of medicine's cultural authority (Zussman 1993, Phillips and Sechzer, 1989). Since 1963, before any federal statutes were on the books, federally funded agencies followed voluntary regulations prescribed by the "NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals."

Questions about the ethical treatment of animals have also found a place in prestigious biomedical and general scientific journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. In an extensive content analysis of the major journals, Phillips and Sechzer (1989) found that these journals now routinely discuss animal pain, alternatives to animal experimentation, and ethics, in contrast to the early 1970s when the encroachment of legislation was the focal issue.

Deans and other high-level administrators in the research communities that I studied also attempted to address the public image of animal cruelty, specific concerns about the oversight of scientists, the utility of their research, and the integrity of their motives. The Associate Provost and Dean of Research in one of the local universities spoke with great pride about the extent to which they attended to these issues:

We provide high quality animal care and use. That is, we have a commitment to provide the best possible facilities....We have a responsibility to make sure: researchers are designing experiments that are appropriate, that have scientific outcome; that people are not using animals needlessly - they have to be reviewed every time they use an animal, they have to be reviewed annually....I feel very proud to be at a university where animals are used responsibly and where we take good care of our animals. We have excellent oversight.

Such officials expressed their horror at the video recording of the Pennsylvania head injury experiments. They were quick to point out how things had changed with the enactment of current regulations. These regulations, they believed, reflected a societal consensus about what constituted ethical behavior.

The Practice of Policies
While the above regulations were clearly designed to protect animals from abuse, they were also designed to protect administrators from the public image of animal cruelty that animal rights activists promoted in their campaigns. This image, however, did not always lend itself to easy policy implementation. I observed three differences between the image and reality of laboratory animal care as perceived by the IACUC, laboratory animal veterinarians and their staff. These differences concerned their experiences with animals, science and social organization.

Animals
A major premise underlying the public image of animal cruelty was that animals would suffer in conditions in which humans would suffer, i.e., the same standards were to be applied to animals and humans. For this reason, regulations stated that animal holding facilities had to be meticulously clean: in one investigator's words, "like a hospital."

From the IACUC's perspective, however, clean animals were not always healthy or happy animals. Some animals appeared to thrive in the dirty and crowded conditions that the guidelines were designed to prevent. This was the case with an animal holding facility that the research personnel in the college town referred to as "the bat tower." The bat tower was notoriously filthy from excrement and frequently the target of criticism from the IACUC. As one long-time member of the college town IACUC discovered, however, bats thrived in these conditions, and died when the investigator tried to clean their environment:

There is a person here who is a world expert on the echolocation of bats. He is a recognized authority. And he keeps the bats in some sort of an old cooler. And apparently it is very dirty. Dirty in the sense that there are a lot of feces, to be blunt. And it stinks. Now...whenever inspected, people say, "Clean your facility." And his answer, I mean he's a caring person, I mean it isn't because he dislikes bats, but he says, "Every time I clean the facility, I have dead bats." He said, "If you have ever been in a bat cave, that is the way bats live. Apparently there is something about having the feces all over that makes the bats happy," and he said, "As silly as it sounds I can clean it up, but if I clean it up, I assure you you will have dead bats." And he said, "I don't do this because I like it. I don't like wearing a gas mask to go in." He said, "That is the way bats like to live." He said, "Please believe me; I'm an expert on it. My whole career is involved and I don't want to be cruel to them, but that's the way bats live."

In such cases, the IACUC called outside experts to try and challenge the investigators claims that some animals enjoyed living in environments that were unacceptable to the committee. Even these outside experts, however, would not deny that certain animals thrived in conditions which the regulations would find unacceptable. For example, the IACUC found that the water in which an investigator kept sea turtles contained potentially harmful bacteria (E.coli). Referring to the water, a committee member told me "It looked kind of grungey." The committee went to great lengths to find three outside experts to testify on the investigators' behalf that the turtles were healthy. One IACUC member explained:

We had three experts come from outside and I assure you we really bent over backwards. One of the experts didn't even like [the investigator]. And all the experts said, "Look, you know, we agree there shouldn't be a lot of coli in the water, but these are the healthiest-looking turtles we have ever seen." One of the experts worked for Sea World and they have tremendous amounts of money. He said, "I get anything I want and my turtles die." Here, you know, these conditions are kind of marginal, yet the turtles are healthier. So they said, "You know, what do you want to do: do you want to live up to the regulations, or do you want to help the animals?"

Another perception of good animal care, shared again by animal rights activists in their public campaigns and legislators alike, was that animals needed sufficient space in which to move around. In the university, the inspector from the United States Department of Agriculture insisted that the pig pens were not large enough to meet the federal regulations, because the pigs could not turn 360 degrees without touching any portion of the enclosure. The university's veterinarian, however, explained to me that:

If you put five pigs in a hundred square feet, they will all crowd into one corner and lie on each other, so behaviorally it didn't make much sense to me.

Eventually, the veterinarian had to house some of the pigs in an outdoor facility where they needed constant supplies of water to keep them cool ­ a bad situation from the point of view of the university's veterinarian because the pigs wallowed in their own excrement:

The pigs stayed covered with mud, living in filth...and that was better, from the standpoint of the Department of Agriculture's interpretation of the law, than my professional judgment.

Concern for prolonged animal suffering also prompted including regulations in the amended Animal Welfare Act about repeatedly conducting surgery on the same animals. Yet there were instances where multiple surgery appeared to be less wasteful and stressful than when the animals were only operated on once. At the college town university, for example, pediatricians used cats to train emergency workers to pass tubes down infants' throats. Students can learn the technique by practicing on cats.

Since the federal regulations discouraged researchers from conducting surgery repeatedly on the same animal, the cats should have been euthanized after each demonstration. However, in the college town, surgeons operated on the same cats repeatedly. One IACUC member had a particular affection for cats. At first, he vehemently disagreed with using them repeatedly. He thought that the decision to do so was economically motivated, being that healthy cats were expensive. He shared the animal rights view that profit and efficiency were being put above the interests of animals. The Chairman of the IACUC told this committee member that the cats did not mind the repeated surgery, and enjoyed being handled by the research personnel. He thought that new cats would experience greater stress. This committee member went to look at the cats for himself, and agreed with the Chairman. He told me:

You've never seen such placid cats. You come to the cage, the cats come up and start purring and they want to come out. So in this case, you use judgment and say while in general repeat procedures are really not a good idea, oddly, it doesn't harm the cat. The cats don't mind and they check them very carefully....Occasionally somebody tears the esophagus of a cat - and the cat has to be euthanized. But is it better to just recycle cats through the procedure?...My opinion is re-use the cats.

Sometimes animal care staff had to euthanize animals because they were too expensive to take care of within the guidelines of the regulations - even though violating the regulations made the animals more content. This was the case with rare animals, which did not fit the standard regulations for other animals. One such project involved a colony of voles that liked to make nests out of "uncleaned" cotton. An IACUC member compared this substance to the upholstery in furniture. The animals particularly liked this material because it was coarse and contained pulp, which made a sturdy nest:

This is what they do in the wild.... they make this nest of cotton ball, and literally crawl into it. It's neat to see. And the mother will have her young within that ball.

Researchers, however, were only permitted to use the sterilized bedding used for rats. The epilogue to this story was euthanasia, since the voles could not be accommodated in regular animal holding facilities.

Science
The main thrust of much of laboratory animal regulation has been to reduce the numbers of animals that researchers use. This has meant restricting animal research to experiments that produce scientifically useful results; that is, benefits to humans or animals. In theory, IACUC members believed that it was not their duty to evaluate the scientific merit of the experiment - they considered this to be the prerogative of grant agencies. However, in practice, they inevitably engaged in debates about the usefulness and validity of the experiments. There were several reasons for this. A few of the committee members (believed by other committee members to be the younger scientists who were out to impress others) could not resist talking about scientific issues that interested them. Others wanted to talk about the scientific merit of experiments that involved "higher animals," such as primates, cats and dogs. These IACUC members believed that they would have to justify such experiments to the public. In some cases, funding agencies wanted approval from the IACUC before accepting the proposal, and some animal use did not involve external funding, such as animals used by surgeons in training.

Committee members, however, encountered problems evaluating the scientific merit of research. Sometimes, they believed that they did not have the expertise to make decisions about research that was beyond their own areas of academic specialization. More significantly, committee members found it difficult to make judgements about the utility of research before it had been undertaken. Indeed, the nature of science, as the committee saw it, was incremental, and did not occur in the big leaps and bounds often portrayed by pro-research organizations (Arluke and Groves, 1994). The university's veterinarian, for example, commented on a research project involving dogs: "For one breakthrough, there are half a dozen or so tries that don't work out." Another committee member commented on his own career in animal research:

That's the way science is. The studies that I did were useful, minor advances. And I'm sure that's the way most of the protocols that we're looking at are. They are minor advances....There is some pretty good stuff that comes along, but many experiments have to be done before that great breakthrough comes along, so when one looks back at it thirty years later, they'll say, "Well, yeah, that looked good at the time and it's a good experiment to do then. But I don't know. I guess it had to be done." You see, some people have the view of science that if they just do this critical experiment, then that's it and they've discovered everything there is to know about the field, and that is not the way it is.

Organization
Legislators shared the animal rights view that animal research needed oversight to ensure that animal researchers followed federal and local guidelines. From the point of view of those dealing with the day-to-day care of laboratory animals, however, oversight did not always prevent violations. In some ways it encouraged them by putting researchers in the roles of administrators, who were then perceived to be like a police force. The university's veterinarian described his role as trying to help researchers through the paper work involved with animal care. However, researchers treated him as an obstacle to be overcome:

Fifteen or twenty percent [of the principal investigators] consider it [the regulations] a fairly serious burden. And of that group, a few percent just absolutely fight tooth and toenail against it. And that's sort of like saying you don't like a fifty-five mile an hour speed limit and so you're going to ignore it....I don't mean to imply that a few percent represents people who are truly inhumane. That's not the point. It's just that they don't like the bureaucracy. And so from my standpoint, that's troubling to me because I feel like I'm trying to help them through the bureaucracy, while at the same time observing legitimate oversight as required by law. But they don't look at it that way. They look at me as being a barricade they have to either run through, climb over, walk around or whatever - that I'm not that helpful, I'm part of the problem.

The IACUC described scenarios in which researchers, resenting having their work reviewed by outsiders, engaged in "verbal sparring": writing incomprehensible protocols which required the IACUC to "track 'em down" for more information. An IACUC member told me about one such game-player, whom he frequently dealt with while reviewing his research proposals:

He likes to be difficult. He enjoys being difficult with vengeance. He takes it almost as a challenge and this person turns forms in that say nothing....He is very brief. He just says, "I'm going to use mice to study immunogenetics because mice are the animals that you are supposed to use to study immunogenetics." I'm exaggerating a bit, but not by much. And the procedures will just be, "I'm going to do this, this, this, this," but he is not going to say how many mice and how and why. And it's clearly not acceptable and this person, believe me, knows it is not acceptable. So you call him up and say, "X, give me a break." And he goes on for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, every time (I've done this three times now) about how stupid the regulations are and how he is an expert.

While some investigators resisted the IACUC's authority, the IACUC often resisted the authority of those above them, namely the USDA inspectors. The university's veterinarian explained to me:

You get young, over-zealous veterinarians who have a lot of book-learning and not a lot of practical experience....You get into a situation where the veterinarian inspector is no different than a traffic cop or a highway patrolman. He is there to enforce the law....I'm like everybody. I'm trying to weasel out of the strict interpretation of some of the guidelines under the law, and that's difficult because it is very, very argumentative as to where the law helps animals and where it doesn't. And in some cases, I don't think it helps the animals a bit.

The hierarchical nature of the review process had an important implication for laboratory animal care: it became more likely that animal care problems would go unreported - the opposite of what the laws were intended to do. The university's veterinarian told me of his reluctance to report defects with his facilities for fear of reprisals from the USDA inspectors.

We used to have a collegial relationship with the USDA. If there was a problem, I'd tell them and we'd work it out together. Now it's an adversarial relationship.

IACUC members thus spoke of enforcing animal care legislation in terms of "covering ass;" pleasing higher officials, sometimes, they believed, at the expense of effective animal care. Despite the appearance of healthy animals, for example, regulations required that a cage washer be replaced in the college town university because it did not wash at the required temperature. This cost the university over $100,000 - money that committee members believed could have been spent on more pressing animal care problems.

How Animal Care Staff Rationalized Discrepant Images of Animal Cruelty

The apparent irrelevance of the regulations in the day-to-day care of animals encouraged law enforcers to become law breakers. That is, the IACUC found it to be more ethical to break the rules than to abide by them. This, however, made them more vulnerable to criticism from animal rights activists who could then point to instances in which researchers violated regulations. In a public symposium on animal research, for instance, animal rights activists accused the university of violating regulations concerning housing macaque monkeys. The monkeys, they claimed, were housed in single cages, and not in groups, as the regulations specified. However, as the speaker defending this practice pointed out, this was another case in which the regulations appeared to undermine the care of the animals:

If you have an animal that has to be removed daily for an experiment ­ the shock and trauma of it, the personal stress of being in and out, taken away ­ the separation can actually be greater than separation all the time. If you have an animal that has implants of recording instruments, you cannot house that animal in a social environment because of the physical damage that can be done. I mean bandages and things like this have to be taken into consideration. It's not that anyone is opposed to the theory that it's better, under normal conditions, to house animals socially. It's the fact that [the regulations] are worded so there was no flexibility for the veterinarian to say, in this case, that it isn't necessarily the best for the animals.

As with this encounter, IACUC members and researchers often rationalized violating regulations by pointing out their futility, along with the ignorance of animal rights activists and government inspectors, implying that it was these parties that were impeding effective laboratory animal care and animal research.

Conclusions
The public representation of animal cruelty in animal rights literature has encouraged concrete policies to prevent cruelty. In public discourse, however, the controversy over animal research is not just about animal cruelty. It is about certain types of cruelty to certain types of animals, namely, pets at the hands of uncaring scientists. Although many animal rights activists would like to abolish all animal research, they have popularized this dimension of animal cruelty to win support from the public for their cause. In doing so, they have changed the way in which the public thinks about animal research.

Differences exist, however, between the public image of the problem and the everyday situations confronted by those who enforce and apply laboratory animal care policy. Current regulations assume that animals uniformly like conditions similar to those of humans. They assume that it is easy to draw boundaries between redundant and useful research, and that regulation will make scientists more accountable to the public. Those involved in the day-to-day care of animals, however, see a world in which animals' tastes are diverse and are sometimes opposite to those of people. They also have to deal with the slow and incremental nature of scientific discovery, which offers no quick solutions and whose outcomes are uncertain. Finally, thrust into the role of administrators, IACUC members become revered or ridiculed and are then in a less advantageous position to learn about laboratory animal care problems.

For these reasons, laboratory animal care regulations have become a divisive issue in the controversy over the use of animals in research. High-ranking university administrators argue that their institutions are exempt from accusations of cruelty by adhering to them. Researchers and laboratory animal care staff have discredited animal rights activists and government inspectors for adopting them, and animal rights activists have questioned the humanity of the research community for dismissing them.

Notes
1. Correspondence should be sent to Julian McAllister Groves, Division of Social Science, University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Part of the research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DIR-9121305). I am grateful to the animal rights activists and animal research staff who candidly shared their views and experiences with me, and to Arnold Arluke, Martha Dahlen and Ken Shapiro for their comments on earlier drafts.

2. The belief that some changes were better than none has also been found among those most staunchly against animal research. Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, for example, has been quoted as saying:

Our position is abolitionist. We don't just want longer chains, although we like longer chains better than shorter chains. We don't want just a few less experiments or a lot less experiments, although we like that better than what is happening now (quoted in Baum, 1990, p. 22).

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