Research
Report on the event "Animal used for research and society: Animal sentience – historical perspectives, scientific progress and implications for society"
On September 24, the fifth conference on "Animal used for research and society" was held in the Émile Duclaux lecture hall and via Teams, organized by the Committee for Ethics in Animal Experimentation (CETEA), the Center for Animal Resources and Research (C2RA) and the Department of Ethics and Bioethics at the Institut Pasteur.
Once again this year, the event attracted great interest, with more than 210 people attending, including many from the Pasteur Network who participated online.
With previous editions having explored in turn each of the "3Rs" that form the central tenet of animal used for research – replacement, reduction and refinement –, this year's conference opened a new chapter by considering animal sentience – animals' ability to experience subjective states, in other words feelings that are positive (such as pleasure, comfort or relief) or negative (such as pain, hunger, fear and distress). Sentience is a concept at the intersection of ethics, philosophy and science, and it raises two major questions that served as the basis for the morning's discussions: How can we measure mental states that animals cannot express through speech? Which species should be included in our sphere of consideration?
The conference began with lectures by Gilles Gheusi, Chair of the CETEA, Jean Jaubert, Director of the C2RA, and Jean-Claude Dupont, Director of the Department of Ethics and Bioethics. Participants were reminded of the changing regulatory context – Directive 2010/63/EU of September 22, 2010 (in French) made cephalopods the first protected invertebrates in research. The need to provide staff with continuing training was also emphasized, as well as the fact that the scope of research ethics has widened to include global issues such as adaptation to climate change and zoonotic risks. Ethics committees were presented as active interdisciplinary bodies that serve as forums for joint discussions and drive a strategy of continuous improvement "from good to best."
Heather Browning, a philosopher at the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), set out the definitions, frontiers and challenges of sentience. Being sentient is not a question of intelligence; it is the ability to feel. That should be the basis for our moral considerations – as Jeremy Bentham wrote, "the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" – and is what makes the notion of well-being apply to all sentient animals. Because subjective states cannot be directly observed, studying them is based on the convergence of multiple behavioral, physiological and neurobiological markers within a form of reasoning known as "inference to the best explanation." It was an approach along these lines that led the United Kingdom to recognize the sentience of cephalopods and decapod crustaceans in its legislation. Heather Browning also encouraged us to consider "what it means to be" a given animal, as each species has its own emotional repertoire, and reminded us of the implications of research using animal with the application of the 3Rs – from the choice of replacement models to methods of refinement tailored to the needs of each species.
Ludovic Dickel, an ethologist at the Research Center for Ethology and Cognition at the University of Caen, gave a presentation in which he examined the journey of cephalopods "from exclusion to protection," starting with the report by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) which concluded that they can experience subjective feelings, continuing with their inclusion in the EU Directive and the drafting of guidelines on how they should be housed and used in research, and culminating in the development of specific frameworks to measure sentience based on their unique neural organization. Experiments carried out on octopuses in particular suggest that pain in these animals is an affective experience and not a mere reflex. Although the data remains patchy, the precautionary principle requires us to consider cephalopods as sentient beings.
Martin Giurfa, neurobologist and director of the Institut de biologie Paris-Seine at Sorbonne University, widened the discussions to include insects, especially the honeybee, whose cognitive abilities are now well documented. His recent research demonstrates that bees conditioned to understand that a light signal will be followed by an electric shock also exhibit long-term physiological markers that cannot be explained only by motor activity and are correlated with learning. These observations, which are compatible with an internal state akin to "fear," go beyond mere reflex, showing that insects can be a useful model for studying the development of emotional states.
Jean-Loup Rault, Professor and Director of the Institute of Animal Welfare Sciences at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, proposed that animal emotions should be reframed "from well-being to better-being": over and above simply preventing negative states, we need to study and promote positive emotions in animals, based on reliable indicators of these states, and to draw practical conclusions regarding their accommodation and care.
The address by Tarek Sharshar, Professor of Neurology and Intensive Care Medicine (Université Paris Cité, Sainte-Anne University Hospital) then broadened the debate by presenting altered states of consciousness in humans. Drawing on his experience as an intensive care neurologist, he showed how medical techniques are used to assess the consciousness of non-verbal patients, a situation that has close similarities with the challenge of assessing animal sentience. This illustrates the potential for useful dialog between clinical practice, neuroscience and animal ethics.
The concluding round table, "Sentience in practice: research, ethics and society," brought all the speakers together with the audience. The discussions explored the real-life implications of the research presented with regard to project evaluation by ethics committees, adapting accommodation and protocols to the ability of each species to feel, training staff, and pursuing research on species that have not yet been the focus of much research, while highlighting the importance of animal use for progress in biomedical research and the need to maintain a dialog with society on these issues.
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See previous conferences:
"Animal testing: improving animal welfare, a review of best practices for animals used in research"