Are We Using the Most Appropriate Animals for Our Research and Are We Doing It for the Best Reasons?

Abstract

Over the last 50 years there have been demands to increase the quality of animals used for research. The  numbers of animals used for individual projects have in the same period decreased, while the efforts put on  the single animal to secure the highest scientific output from it have increased. Basically this is a very  important part of both “refinement” and “reduction”; those two of the three R’s which, it previously has  been argued, were less in focus than the last R, ‘replacement’ (Nevalainen, 2005).