From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000--

USDA agrees--finally--that rats, mice, and birds are animals

WASHINGTON D.C.-- U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle on October 4
agreed to hear arguments from Johns Hopkins Univer-sity and the National
Association for Biomedical Research against a precedent-setting agreement
under which the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service would
settle a lawsuit brought by the Alternatives Research & Develop-ment
Foundation by bringing rats, mice, and birds under the protection of the
federal Animal Welfare Act.
The proposed agreement requires the USDA to amend the definition of
"animal" in the Animal Welfare Act enforcement regulations so as to remove
the exclusion of rats, mice, and birds which has been in effect since
1970.
The agreement will take effect if affirmed by Judge Huvelle and not
overturned on appeal.
The Alternatives Research & Development Foundation is an affiliate
of the Philadelphia-based American Anti-Vivisection Society. It pursued a
well-beaten path which had often led nowhere for other petitioners when in
April 1998 it formally asked the USDA to recognize that rats, mice, and
birds are animals, and therefore were meant by Congress to be protected
under the 1970 amendments to 1966 Labor-atory Animal Welfare Act which
extended the scope of coverage to all "warm-blooded animals...used or
intended for use, for research, testing, experimentation or exhibition."

That 1970 language remained intact in the 1976 and 1985 amendments
that established the Animal Welfare Act in present form. But petitions
from animal advocates attempting to persuade the USDA to heed the evident
intent of Congress were repeatedly rejected under pressure from biomedical
researchers.
Lawsuits were then filed seeking to compel the USDA to obey the
law. Twice the plaintiffs won in the Washington D.C. District courtroom of
the late federal judge Claude Richey, but lost in the U.S. Court of
Appeals for allegedly lacking legal standing.
On September 1, 1998, however, in a reversal of past rulings,
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington D.C. Circuit agreed in Animal
Legal Defense Fund v. [Secretary of Agriculture Daniel] Glickman that
individuals and humane societies were intended by Congress to have standing
to sue to enforce the AWA. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the appellate
ruling without comment.
This gave extra weight to the lawsuit filed against the USDA in
March 1999 by ARDF and Beaver College biology student Kristine Gauz of
Philadelphia.
Johns Hopkins and NABR contend that extending the Animal Welfare
Act to protect rats, mice, and birds would cost researchers an additional
$80 million to $90 million per year just to meet the paperwork
requirements. They also claim that the existing animal care standards
prescribed by the National Institutes of Health as a condition of receiving
federal funding are protection enough for the estimated 23 million rats and
mice and the unknown but much smaller number of birds now used in
laboratories.
However, American AV executive director Tina Nelson told ANIMAL
PEOPLE, "Currently only 5% of laboratory animals are covered by legally
mandated minimum standards of care and use. The three largest
organizations representing the laboratory animal community have all
endorsed listing rats, mice, and birds. None of these professional
laboratory animal-focused groups have identified any threat to research
that would result from the inclusion of rats, mice, and birds."
Those organizations are the American Association of Laboratory
Animal Science, Association for Assessment and Accreditation of
Laboraratory Animal Care International, and Scientists' Center for Animal
Welfare.
The first impact of extending the Animal Welfare Act to rats,
mice, and birds would be that federally funded institutions would at last
be obligated to provide complete annual accountings of the numbers of all
of the animals they use, which in turn would permit accurate assessment of
whether the numbers are going up or down.
Under the present AWA enforcement regulations, the totals can only
be guesstimated from the tallies of animals used other than rats, mice,
and birds.
Historically, at institutions which voluntarily provided the
numbers of rats, mice, and birds used, rats and mice were more than 90%
of the total, so the standard approach has been to multiply by 10 the
numbers of animals reported.
However, the numbers used of almost all other species have
declined steadily for 10 to 20 years.
Use of rats and mice is believed to have declined during the 1980s
and most of the 1990s due to the replacement of traditional LD-50 testing
of toxic substances with the LD-10, which uses only 20% as many animals,
and with non-animal alternative tests.
In addition, the advent of genetic engineering is believed to have
encouraged researchers to use small numbers of custom-bred rats and mice in
their investigations, rather than large numbers of less expensive animals
who may not respond to the illness or other condition under study.
But the downward trend could have been reversed recently by work
done in connection with the High Production Volume chemical safety testing
agreements reached in early 1999 among the Environment-al Protection
Agency, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and the Environmental
Defense Fund.
The American Anti-Vivi-section Society is the oldest organization
in the U.S. advocating for animals used in science, founded in 1883 by
Caroline Earle White.
An anti-slavery crusader before the U.S. Civil War, White started
the Women's Humane Society of Philadelphia in 1870, took the first animal
control contract handled by a humane society in 1872, went on to found the
Pennsyl-vania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, and continued to
head American AV until 1911.
White died in 1916, at age 83, recalling as her greatest single
success the lawsuit which compelled railroads to obey a federal law
requiring them to feed and water cattle in transit at least once in each 28
hours.