About the event
This year’s theme was ‘Reducing Severity in Animal Research’ and included sessions on ‘Demonstrating Ethical Awareness and Accountability’, ‘Reducing severity’, ‘Improving Care and Welfare’, ‘Fostering Culture of Care’, and ‘Aiming for a better future’, where attendees had the opportunity to refine their knowledge and share their experiences.
We had a big presence throughout the Congress and actively participated in many sessions by chairing, presenting, and facilitating workshops.
Summary
Most of our work was presented in the ‘Reducing severity’ session, where we convened three different workshops:
- We held a ‘user session’ workshop to demonstrate our ‘Roadmap to reducing severe suffering’. The Roadmap is a practical exercise that helps you to focus on procedures in your institution that could cause severe suffering, identify contributing factors and find ways of avoiding or refining these. Our highly sought-after workshop was attended and well-received by 40 participants. This 90-minute workshop also resulted in various requests to facilitate this same session in other countries, such as Switzerland and Mexico.
- We convened, chaired, and presented at the workshop ‘Identifying sub-lethal clinical signs in fishes’, which focused on recommendations from our 2023 UK meeting on regulatory toxicology tests using fishes. Mortality is a key cause of severe suffering, and there can be an increased risk of this in tests using fishes, e.g. in regulatory toxicology procedures within OECD 203 and OECD 210 testing guidelines. This workshop included presentations from prominent experts in welfare and refinements for fishes, followed by a discussion. The session explored how progress could be made in identifying sub-lethal clinical signs and applying humane endpoints, as well as identifying positive actions for all those involved in the care and use of fishes. Two key points were the need for more, better quality training in welfare assessment for people at all career stages, and more use of score sheets.
- We convened and chaired a workshop on ‘Retrospective Assessment of projects involving procedures classified as severe’, that enabled participants to share good practice approaches to effectively conduct retrospective assessments. The session focused on the requirement to review ‘severe’ procedures, looking at harms and benefits, how effectively the 3Rs were implemented, and ways of sharing insights internally and externally. The presentations were followed by a discussion session exploring current processes for conducting retrospective assessments, including any challenges people face. Similarly to the previous workshop, needs were identified for more training, and feedback, for researchers doing retrospective assessments.
Besides convening, chairing, and facilitating workshops, we also presented two posters in this session:
- Humane endpoints in regulatory toxicology for fishes. Participants of our 2023 UK meeting on regulatory toxicology tests using fishes identified that there is currently insufficient guidance on identifying sub-lethal clinical signs, and applying humane endpoints, for fishes used in toxicology tests. This poster highlights the roles and actions of relevant groups to tackle these issues, and proposes practical recommendations to avoid them.
- Focus on severe suffering - picking the high-hanging fruit. This poster calls attention to some of the areas of research and testing that are harder to refine to reduce severe suffering and includes important action points to overcome them. You can use it to help reduce severity in protocols that are more challenging to refine.