There is increasing concern that biomedical animal studies are not always reliable or predictive. Contributing factors to inconsistent results include poor experimental design, inappropriate analysis methods and incomplete reporting. The NC3Rs Experimental Design Assistant (EDA, https://eda.nc3rs.org.uk) is free-to-use online software that helps researchers design more rigorous animal experiments by providing bespoke feedback on experimental designs. This feedback highlights the implications of particular design decisions and enables users to make informed choices, tailored to their experimental objectives. The EDA is endorsed by major biomedical research funders worldwide as a tool to help researchers design experiments that are more likely to yield robust and reproducible data, while using the minimum number of animals consistent with scientific objectives. Detailed experimental reporting is key to reducing irreproducible results. The ARRIVE guidelines (www.ARRIVEguidelines.org) can help researchers ensure they are reporting experiments comprehensively and transparently. Recently revised, the ARRIVE guidelines are accompanied by an explanation and elaboration document providing more information about each item in the guidelines, and examples of good reporting from the scientific literature. This talk will discuss main causes of reliability issues in animal experiments and how the EDA and ARRIVE guidelines can help address these.

Farm animal welfare studies involve two types of subjects: animals reared in many different housing and production systems (either in laboratories or in commercial conditions), and humans involved directly or indirectly in the use of these animals. The ethical standards of research are expressed in the way the animals are reared, the choice of research procedures, the analysis of results, and the reporting of the methodology and the data. Poor ethical standards of research may have repercussions on the reproducibility of results, public support for research involving animals and humans, and even the trust in scientists and in science. To ensure high ethical standards, research involving humans and animals is often reviewed by third parties: before the research starts, by institutional boards, and during the publication process, by editors and reviewers. The quality of these assessments and of the guidelines followed by these parties can be influenced by the views and the formal training of researchers and local and national committees or regulatory agencies on the issue. Problems may arise when researchers have no access to ethics committees, or journals fail to guide or enforce ethical standards. There is a need for a shift in culture, where the ethical standards of research are considered a key component of “research quality”.

The use of animals in behavioural and welfare research may appear to differ from mainstream use of animals in biomedical research in one of two ways. Firstly, it may be seen as mostly not invasive, and mild in terms of its welfare impact (this is primarily the case with behavioural research). Secondly it may be seen as being conducted in the interest of animals rather than in the interest of humans (this is primarily the case with welfare research). For these reasons, many of those who use animals in behavioural and welfare research typically consider themselves to be in a different ethical situation compared to those who use animals in studying human diseases, for safety testing and the like.
However, there is a growing awareness that using animals in behavioural and welfare research in fact presents ethical concerns like those arising from other forms of animal use. Furthermore, behavioural and welfare research must comply with the same regulatory requirements as other forms of animal research – even though there are large regional and national differences between these requirements. Behavioural research, in addition, may involve human owners and other human research subjects, giving rise to a separate category of regulatory requirements.
In this introductory talk I aim to: 1) discuss to what extent the use of animals in behavioural and welfare research differs from other forms of animal use; 2) introduce the main ethical principles relating to the use of animals for research and testing, notably the 3Rs and the requirement of a positive harm-benefit assessment; 3) highlight some of the regional and national differences in regulatory requirements and the problems this gives rise to when collaborating and publishing internationally; and 4) introduce the specific requirements arising when behavioural and welfare research involves human research subjects.

In this talk I will consider the question of why the geopolitics of trophy hunting are so fraught. In particular, I will break down the various tensions and domains that make the trophy hunting debate so complex: (i) Agency: Who has the say? Who is the ‘local’? (ii) Power: Who has the power to make decisions that matter? How has this become a political football? (iii) Morality/ethicality: Who is ‘right’? Who is ‘wrong’? and (iv) Academy/research institutions: What constitutes ‘evidence’? What role do conflicts of interest play in the associated knowledge production? Most importantly, how can all the different actors find common ground to achieve their common interest, that is, conservation of megafauna?