Abstract
In his essay, “Federal Laws and Policies Governing Animal Research—Their History, Nature and Adequacy,” Bernard Rollin offers us a brief history of Public Health Service Policy on, and legislation affecting animal rights in experimental contexts. Starting with laws against both blatant cruelty and wanton neglect of animals, the author argues that the practices outlawed by The Animal Welfare Act in 1966 were not motivated by a need to protect animal rights based on the independent moral status of animals in experimental contexts. When first enacted, anticruelty laws were largely irrelevant to the use of animals in scientific research and teaching. In fact, in 1982, the Superior Court of Maryland ruled that anticruelty statutes did not apply in the context of defensible scientific research conducted in private labs. The Animal Welfare Act, as ammended in 1976 was, however, basically an extension of the anticruelty laws to experimental contexts. At any rate, the conservative nature of animal rights legislation before 1985 was clear in that the Congress explicitly disavowed any attempt to regulate research per se conducted in a research facility.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Humber, J.M., Almeder, R.F. (1991). Introduction. In: Humber, J.M., Almeder, R.F. (eds) Biomedical Ethics Reviews · 1990. Biomedical Ethics Reviews. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0471-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0471-8_7
Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
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Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-0471-8
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