HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 71 
form particular experiments, and by limitation of the kind of experi- 
ments they may actually do, and that their time is consumed by the 
endless filling out of forms. 
From personal experience of the working of the British Act, I can 
deny the truth of these heart- wringing stories. As nearly as I can 
recall its wording, my own license gave me the right to perform ex- 
periments designed to “elucidate the physiological mechanisms of the 
cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, excretory, reproductive, and 
nervous systems of mammals.” Any lack of generality in these terms 
was due not to the restrictive hand of the Home Office but to my own 
failure to be more general when requesting the license. Provided I 
confined my experiments to species other than dogs or horses — a re- 
striction that may perhaps be regarded as a concession to the well- 
known sentimentality of the English with regard to these species — ;■ 
did not intend the animals to survive the experiments, did not perform 
them without anesthesia (except for inoculations, injections, and sim- 
ple venesection or venepuncture) or use relaxants, and did not demon- 
strate them except to other scientists, the application for this license 
was the only application that I had to make to be allowed to perform 
this wide variety of experimental procedures through the whole of 
my research and teaching career. At the same time that I applied for 
my license, I applied for and was granted the certificate that allowed 
me also to do all of these things as demonstrations for my students, 
and this one application sufficed for the whole of my professional 
career in the United Kingdom. Those of my colleagues who wished 
to perform survival experiments or experiments on dogs were granted 
blanket permission to do this for the duration of a particular research 
project, on the submission of a single application. 
In the department in which I worked, the keeping of records was 
simple and far from time consuming. Each worker entered in a 
book, on a page or pages kept for his own use, the information re- 
quired by statute and relevant to his own experiments. As I recall, 
this was : the date ; animal species ; whether or not, and, if so, how the 
animal had been made insensitive to pain; whether a relaxant had 
been used ; and what additional certificates had been in force ; that is, 
whether allowing survival, use of dogs, demonstration to students, 
and so forth. This, mostly written in abbreviations, and a signature, 
the whole occupying a single line of the page, was all that was needed 
as a record of a single experiment. Multiple experiments of a minor 
character — for example, the injection of a drug into a number of 
rates — could be covered by a single entry. At the end of the year, 
the departmental secretary made a summary of the number of ani- 
mals operated on by each worker under license alone or under license 
plus one or more certificates ; and these figures were used by each of 
us to complete the simple return — usually involving only one or two 
lines of entry on a form provided — that we had to submit to the 
House Office within the first few weeks of the new year. The only 
other requirement for us as individuals was to submit to the Home 
Office a single copy (reprint) of each paper that we published in 
which experiments performed under license were described. 
I can say truthfully that I was never prevented from doing any 
experiment that I wished to do, that any requests that I made to the 
Home Office — for example, for blanket permission for the use of 
