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Use surplus laboratory animals as animal feed

Lab Animal volume 51, page 233 (2022)Cite this article

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To the Editor — For the breeding of animals used in experiments in the EU alone, each year approximately 14 million additional animals are needed that cannot themselves be used in experiments due to their genotype, sex, or age1. Careful breeding and experimental design can only avoid this to a limited extent, because Mendel´s laws inevitably result in offspring with usually unwanted genotypes. These animals are frequently killed without alternative use. For this reason, German biomedical scientists find themselves caught in a legal battle arising from the requirement in German law for a sensible cause to legitimize the killing of an animal – without such cause, the law makes the killing of animals a criminal offense as recently described in detail2. Also in other countries, the practice of killing surplus animals has come under scrutiny3,4.

A reasonable solution to this ethical (and in Germany legal2) problem would be the feeding of these animals to carnivores in human custody, such as in falconries, zoos, and private homes (e.g., snakes). Currently, millions of animals, especially mice and rats, are bred and killed solely for the purpose of feeding larger animals. Husbandry conditions for research animals are of a considerably higher standard than those of feeder animals, reducing welfare concerns and risk of zoonosis5,6,7,8.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Committee for Genetics and Laboratory Animal Breeding, GV-SOLAS, German Society for Laboratory Animal Science, Freiburg, Germany

    Katja Hose, Stefan Nagel-Riedasch, Johannes Schenkel & Thorsten Buch

  2. District Government of Giessen, Giessen, Germany

    Katja Hose

  3. Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Forschungseinrichtungen für Experimentelle Medizin (FEM), Berlin, Germany

    Stefan Nagel-Riedasch

  4. Institute of Laboratory Animal Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Thorsten Buch

Authors
  1. Katja Hose
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  2. Stefan Nagel-Riedasch
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  3. Johannes Schenkel
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  4. Thorsten Buch
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Correspondence to Thorsten Buch.

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Hose, K., Nagel-Riedasch, S., Schenkel, J. et al. Use surplus laboratory animals as animal feed. Lab Anim 51, 233 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41684-022-01035-7

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