[Humanitarian and academic aspects of animal experimentation]

The author, while discussing the causes of increased demand for use of laboratory animals in biomedical research in the recent several decades, describes the origin of various social movements for the defense of the rights of animals in many countries. The paper lists the methods and ways of defending the animals' rights and numerous examples of appropriate resolutions and instructions of world institutions (UN, UNESCO, WHO), international and national bodies to regulate the animals' rights, protection and use for experimental and production purposes. The need for supervision of animal experiments, limitation of their use (only in indispensable and justified cases) and replacement with alternative methods for instance with cell, bacterial and fungal cultures, studies on species of a lower order, etc. is indicated. The author suggests that the number of laboratory animals in biomedical studies should be decreased emphasizing the need for appropriate organizational and administrative changes and use of animals with high sanitary and hygienic standards. The final part of the paper is devoted to nonspecific (environmental) anatomic and pathological changes found in the organs of laboratory animals. Based upon the proposed scoring system the author advocates a detailed description of these changes and comparison of the total pattern of changes with those in a matched control group.