Animal protection and toxicity testing regulations

Safety testing illustrates a very real ethical dilemma between our moral obligations to protect humans and to protect animals from harm. The pragmatic approach to resolving this conflict is to pursue the 3 Rs of Replacement, Reduction and Refinement. Safety tests set out in regulation protocols often conflict with this ethic, being wasteful in numbers of animals used, having unnecessarily severe end-points and resulting in duplication. Suggestions for refinement of these tests are discussed. It is concluded that such refinement could lead to the generation of more meaningful data, thus improving both animal protection and human safety.