Question: There are a lot of rumours that mice in animal testing are treated badly etc. What do you say? How good do you treat your animals?

Hannah Farley answered on 10 Jun 2018:

I would say the animals where I work are treated very well. Different countries have different regulations around animal testing, and the UK is very strict. I had to sit exams and be trained before being allowed to work with mice, and everything that we do has to be approved by an ethics panel who decide whether the science is worthwhile, and whether the mice will suffer. For example,if you say that you are collecting a certain amount of blood to do testing, and you take more than that, you could go to jail for cruelty to animals. Here is a link to a virtual tour of the mouse house where my mice live (http://www.labanimaltour.org/harwell). They are checked regularly and have constant access to food and water, and we do our best to keep them with other animals so they have companions – sometimes the boy mice can fight so this isn’t always possible. People who work at my centre are developing a cage monitoring system that can observe the mice constantly and let the animal technicians know if any of them are acting strangely. Animal welfare is at the forefront of what we do – it isn’t particularly nice to have to use animals, and if there were alternative ways of doing what I’m doing then I would take them straight away. But for my work, we haven’t got a good way to model embryonic development with out using animal embryos, and I think it is important that we understand how congenital heart defects can happen.