Trends in Animal Use and Animal Alternatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Third World Congress (1999, Bologna) celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Russell & Burch's The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. There was the general notion that the Three Rs offer a unifying concept that contributes to a progressive reduction and refinement in animal use without compromising the quality of research, human health or the protection of the environment. The Bologna Three Rs Declaration was accepted unanimously, calling upon all parties involved to incorporate the Three Rs into animal-based research. The question is raised, what progress has been made and, in particular, what are the developments in animal use and in the implementation of validated alternative methods. For the present contribution, we requested colleagues from European countries, Canada and the United States to provide information on the numbers of animals currently used for scientific purposes, on the development and implementation of alternative methods and on future perspectives about the issues. Based on the results of this survey, the conclusion is reached that legislative regulations are widely implemented and have become rather strict during the last decade. An exception here is the legislative regulation for rats, mice and birds in the USA. These species are not (yet) protected by the US Animal Welfare Act. The number of animals used has decreased considerably, and the review of protocols by animal ethics committees has become a significant trend. In all countries, there is growing support for the Three Rs concept.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".