Regulations and laws Research requiring vivisection techniques that cannot be met through other means is often subject to an external
ethics review in conception and implementation, and in many jurisdictions use of
anesthesia is legally mandated for any surgery likely to cause
pain to any
vertebrate. In the United States, the
Animal Welfare Act explicitly requires that any procedure that may cause pain use "tranquilizers, analgesics, and anesthetics" with exceptions when "scientifically necessary". The act does not define "scientific necessity" or regulate specific scientific procedures, but approval or rejection of individual techniques in each federally funded lab is determined on a case-by-case basis by the
Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which contains at least one veterinarian, one scientist, one non-scientist, and one other individual from outside the university. In the United Kingdom, any experiment involving vivisection must be licensed by the
Home Secretary. The
Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 "expressly directs that, in determining whether to grant a licence for an experimental project, 'the Secretary of State shall weigh the likely adverse effects on the animals concerned against the benefit likely to accrue. In
Australia, the Code of Practice "requires that all experiments must be approved by an Animal Experimentation Ethics Committee" that includes a "person with an interest in animal welfare who is not employed by the institution conducting the experiment, and an additional independent person not involved in animal experimentation."
Anti-vivisection movement Anti-vivisectionists have played roles in the emergence of the
animal welfare and
animal rights movements, arguing that animals and humans have the same
natural rights as living creatures, and that it is inherently immoral to inflict pain or injury on another living creature, regardless of the purpose or potential benefit to mankind.
19th century At the turn of the 19th century, medicine was undergoing a transformation, which was visible through the emergence of hospitals and the development of more advanced medical tools such as the stethoscope. There was also an increased recognition that medical practices needed to be improved, as many of the current therapeutics were based on unproven, traditional theories that may or may not have helped the patient recover. The demand for more effective treatment shifted emphasis to research with the goal of understanding disease mechanisms and anatomy. While Magendie's approach would today be considered an abuse of animal rights, both Bell and Magendie used the same rationalization for vivisection: the cost of animal experimentation being worth it for the benefit of humanity. Magendie faced widespread opposition in British society, among the general public but also his contemporaries, including
William Sharpey who described his experiments aside from cruel as "purposeless" and "without sufficient object", a feeling he claimed was shared among other physiologists.
David Ferrier and the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 was administered as an
anesthetic to this
common sand frog. The
Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876 in Britain determined that one could only conduct vivisection on animals with the appropriate license from the state, and that the work the physiologist was doing had to be original and absolutely necessary. The stage was set for such legislation by physiologist
David Ferrier. Ferrier was a pioneer in understanding the brain and used animals to show that certain locales of the brain corresponded to bodily movement elsewhere in the body in 1873. He put these animals to sleep, and caused them to move unconsciously with a probe. Ferrier was successful, but many decried his use of animals in his experiments. Some of these arguments came from a religious standpoint. Some were concerned that Ferrier's experiments would separate God from the mind of man in the name of science. The
American Anti-Vivisection Society advocated total abolition of vivisection whilst others such as the
American Society for the Regulation of Vivisection wanted better regulation subjected to surveillance, not full prohibition. The
Research Defence Society made up of an all-male group of physiologists was founded in 1908 to defend vivisection. In the 1920s, anti-vivisectionists exerted significant influence over the editorial decisions of medical journals. ==Human vivisection==