HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS USED IN RESEARCH 89 
be no purpose in passing any bill in our country for the purpose of requiring 
humane treatment of experimental animals if the bill does not include individual 
licensing. Opponents wish to dispense with this vital provision, knowing that 
the bill cannot be enforced without it. We have had long experience in ob- 
serving the operation of State laws, most of them passed at the behest of the 
NSMR for the purpose of procuring animals. These laws provide for the 
licensing of institutions, and, in theory, the license might be withdrawn for cause, 
but an infraction of the law calling for suspension or revocation of license 
wolud put a halt to all animal experiments throughout the institution. The re- 
sult of such legal draftmanship is that the innocent must suffer with the guilty 
or the law is never enforced. The latter is generally the case. Clearly, Con- 
gress ought not to follow this highly unsatisfactory pattern. 
Third, by the limitation of plain infliction amounting to torture. In England, 
every license carries with it a series of conditions, among them those known as 
the pain conditions, which provide that animals that are suffering must be 
painlessly killed as soon as the main result of the experiment has been achieved 
and that if an animal “is found to be suffering severe pain which is likely to 
endure, such animal shall forthwith be painlessly killed.” Further, if an in- 
spector finds an animal suffering considerable pain and directs that it be de- 
stroyed this shall be done at once. These principles have been incorporated in 
H.R. 1937. 
Fourth, minimum standards of care and comfortable housing are required. 
Fifth, student work, as distinct from research conducted by qualified scien- 
tists, must be painless. 
Sixth, records adequate to allow the inspectors to enforce the law are required. 
Because an issue has been made on this subject by opponents of H.R. 1937, the 
allegations of “redtape” and “burdensome recordkeeping” should be carefully 
examined. To be a modern scientist and not keep records is obviously unthink- 
able. The greater the emphasis on the statistical approach the more records 
necessarily have to be kept. This is not the fault of H.R. 1937, which asks no 
more, so far as records and identification of cages or animals, than every re- 
sponsible scientist now keeps. The false rumor has been spread that each in- 
dividual animal used (for example, a thousand mice in a single experiment) 
would have to have a separate piece of paper filled out for it and that this is what 
British scientists are now doing. It should be obvious to any thinking person that 
this is not the case — as one British scientist now working in the United States 
put it : “Reading some of the propagandist literature circulated to me recently 
by the scientific societies of which I am a member, I have had a feeling of un- 
reality about the whole affair, engendered by my inability to recognize, in their 
descriptions of the restrictions and burdens under which their British colleagues 
labor, the system under which I worked for so many years ; sometimes I have 
wondered what cloud-cuckoo land they have confused with Great Britain.” 
H.R. 1937 is in no way more demanding than the British act upon whose principles 
it is based. The record in question would show what the responsible research 
worker must know if his work is to have any meaning: How many animals, 
what procedure was used on them, what happened to them ? All well-run labora- 
tories have cages or animals or both marked so that they do not get mixed up. 
H.R. 1937 would require all laboratories that receive Federal funds to come up 
to proper standards in this respect. I have been in many laboratories where 
cages are unmarked or have old marking unrelated to their current occupants. 
In one hospital, I observed dogs whose cages were identified with the name 
of a doctor who had not used dogs for 2 years. 
Another aspect of the so-called redtape which has been attacked are the 
project plans. Every scientist who gets a grant from the Federal Government 
has to present his experimental plans in far greater detail than anything called 
for in H.R. 1937. He has to wait considerable periods before he learns whether 
his grant has been accepted or not. Unscrupulous opponents of H.R. 1937 have 
deliberately misled many scientists into believing that the same would hold 
true with regard to the submission of project plans in this bill. The truth is 
that the bill was most carefully drawn to prevent any possible delay. Project 
plans must be prefiled, not preapproved. There can be no delay because the 
scientist is at liberty to proceed as soon as his plan is on file. Supposing that 
he later finds a different promising avenue of approach, will his original project 
plan cover him legally? If there were no difference in the procedures relating 
to animal suffering, it probably would. If, on the other hand, he decided to 
change from an experiment involving no pain to one involving pain, he would 
