Animal rights organization Stop Animal Exploitation Now sent a letter to University President Santa Ono and the Board of Regents on Jan. 23, urging the University of Michigan administration to fire the laboratory members associated with two animal use violations last year.
The letter contains copies of two improper animal use infractions in U-M laboratories reported by the University’s Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee to the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. OLAW requires research institutions like the University to form an IACUC, a board responsible for the supervision and approval of animal use protocols in laboratories.
On Jul. 11, 2023, Rebecca Cunningham, U-M vice president for research and official for the University’s IACUC, filed the first cited report with OLAW. According to the report, one lab member failed to perform a secondary euthanasia on 11 mice, which were found to be alive before being properly euthanized. The attending veterinarian removed the lab member’s access to the vivarium, where the animals are housed, and the IACUC issued a six-month suspension and mandatory retraining to the principal investigator’s animal use protocol and personnel. In a response to Cunningham’s report, Brent Morse, director of the OLAW Division of Compliance Oversight, said OLAW found no cause for further action and felt the IACUC’s decisions were adequate.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, SAEN Director Michael Budkie said he found Morse’s response to the violation disappointing.
“In all of the time that we have been obtaining these documents and we have been doing so for essentially a decade now … we have never seen the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare issue any kind of a meaningful penalty against a research facility,” Budkie said. “Their correspondence typically amounts to nothing more than a rubber stamp of whatever the research facility in question is to say.”
On July 13, Cunningham filed the second cited incident of misconduct with OLAW, which stated that a lab member left two anesthetized mice unattended for over 15 minutes. The lab member also delayed the euthanasia of a mouse for over an hour, exceeding the time to euthanasia set by the veterinarian. Following the incident, the principal investigator removed the lab member’s animal use privileges and required them to retake online training. The University’s IACUC then suspended the lab member’s privileges for a minimum of 60 days followed by a 90-day period of supervision under the area veterinarian.
In both reports, Cunningham said the IACUC determined the incidents were isolated to those specific laboratories and not related to program-wide issues.
In response to the violations, SAEN’s letter asks the University to fire the responsible lab technicians and any staff connected to the incidents. The organization also calls for a full audit to be conducted by an independent organization on the University’s Animal Care and Use Program to “discover the source of all violations and failures.”
Budkie said his own experiences with animal research at the University of Cincinnati support SAEN’s demands for the firing of the lab members.
“We do believe that the staff involved in those incidents should be terminated because the violations are so basic that they demonstrate that the people at the University of Michigan that work in the laboratories are not adequately trained,” Budkie said. “They do not understand the most basic of standards such as properly performing euthanasia or even following the directives from veterinary staff.”
In the future, Budkie said he hopes the University will reassess animal use procedures and eventually move away from animal use in laboratories as a whole.
“We are hopeful that (when) the University of Michigan administration will look at their own practices and procedures, they will hopefully eliminate the staff which is consistently violating federal regulations,” Budkie said. “We are also hopeful that they will move much further in the direction of non-animal research. SAEN is opposed to all use of animals and experimentation, because it is both unscientific and fraudulent.”
Social Work student Josie Brown, president of the Michigan Animal Respect Society, said she also wants the University to place less emphasis on animal experimentation because animal bodies are not accurate representations of human anatomy.
“I think the general move away from using animals for research would be great,” Brown said. “There’s a lot of computational measures as technology is getting better and better that we can use, (such as) in vitro studies on human cells and tissues. As technology is developing, we can develop beyond having to use animals.”
Brown also found fault with the IACUC’s outlined goals of promoting animal welfare through proper practices and procedures.
“I think a big problem with a lot of these standards is, ‘How are we measuring them?’ and ‘Who is deciding the way we measure them?’ ” Brown said. “There’s an interesting word that is thrown around a lot when talking about animals, which is the idea of humaneness. But if you look at the definition of humane, it means to be benevolent. And I don’t know if we’re being very benevolent when we’re … not properly murdering (mice) for our research.”
In an email to The Daily, University spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen cited the University’s statement on animal use and said the University followed its outlined procedures for responding to animal use violations.
“In addition to self-reporting these incidents to our accrediting body, the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International, and the National Institute of Health’s OLAW, several corrective actions were taken internally to reinforce the requirement that individuals perform only those activities outlined in their approved animal use protocol and for which they have received appropriate training,” Broekhuizen wrote. “AAALAC and OLAW both reviewed these matters and found that the University took all necessary steps to correct and self-report these isolated incidents.”
Budkie said the University has not responded to his letter.
“They have not replied in any way,” Budkie said. “That is typical practice of large institutions like the University of Michigan. They believe if they ignore situations like this, they will just go away.”
Daily Staff Reporter Marissa Corsi can be reached at macorsi@umich.edu.