Ch. 13— Federal Regulation of Animal Use • 299 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 
The Animal Welfare Act and its amendments rep- 
resent a cautious and deliberate attempt by Con- 
gress to improve care and treatment of research 
animals. Initially, the act was designed to regulate 
interstate traffic in dogs and cats used for research, 
with the goal of halting the use of stolen pets. This 
was accomplished by requiring Federal licenses 
for dealers, requiring research facilities to regis- 
ter, and instituting inspection and recordkeeping 
requirements for both. Enforcement responsibil- 
ity was vested in the Animal and Plant Health In- 
spection Service of the U.S. Department of Agri- 
culture, an agency not aligned with traditional, 
nonagricultural research interests. Three times 
the act was amended; twice the amendments ex- 
tended interstate regulation to exhibition, trans- 
portation, and auction sales of covered animals 
(which, as enforced, now includes dogs, cats, rab- 
bits, hamsters, guinea pigs, and nonhuman pri- 
mates). The oversight of animal use by commit- 
tees at every research facility was mandated in 
the most recent amendments. 
A legislative reluctance to invade the actual con- 
duct of research is clear. The Secretary of Agri- 
culture is forbidden to enact any regulation that 
could be so construed. The closest the law comes 
is to require the Secretary to establish and enforce 
standards for care and treatment of experimental 
animals outside the laboratory door, and to require 
covered research facilities to certify that profes- 
sionally acceptable standards of care, treatment, 
and use are being followed in the laboratory, in- 
cluding "appropriate" use of anesthetics and pain 
relievers, except when their use would interfere 
with experimental objectives. In addition, large 
classes of experimental animals— principally mice 
and rats— are not covered by the act as it is cur- 
rently enforced by the Department of Agriculture, 
and the law's provisions remain weighted toward 
traffic in pet species. Since interstate regulation 
constitutionally requires some connection to inter- 
state commerce, research institutions that use ani- 
mals protected by the act but that receive no Fed- 
eral funds and that maintain their own breeding 
colonies cannot be regulated. To date, there has 
been no significant judicial test of the provisions 
regulating research. 
The Health Research Extension Act of 1985 
amended the Public Health Service Act with pro- 
visions for the care and treatment of animals in 
PHS-funded research. The 1985 act also contained 
provisions for the development of alternatives to 
research methods using animals. 
In addition to the Animal Welfare Act and the 
Health Research Extension Act of 1985, there is 
regulation of the use of laboratory animals at the 
Federal agency level. The Interagency Research 
Animal Committee was formed to provide a knowl- 
edgeable source about all vertebrate animal use 
in testing, research, and training within the Fed- 
eral Government. It has developed the U.S. Gov- 
ernment’s "Principles for the Utilization and Care 
of Vertebrate Animals Used in Testing, Research, 
and Training” at the request of the Executive Of- 
fice of Science and Technology Policy. The IRAC 
principles are endorsed by the Public Health Serv- 
ice, are part of the widely used NIH Guide for the 
Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and are used 
by some Federal agencies in their own policies on 
animal use. 
Six Federal departments and four Federal agen- 
cies conduct animal experimentation within Fed- 
eral facilities (see app. B). Only the Departments 
of Commerce and Transportation, which use few 
animals, have no specific guidelines . The other en- 
tities all have some type of policy for such in- 
tramural research. In general, the more research 
conducted by an agency, the more extensive are 
its animal care guidelines. In addition, departments 
in which animal treatment has been targeted by 
animal welfare groups or spotlighted by the me- 
dia tend to have more substantive guidelines. 
