Ethical regulation and animal science: why animal behaviour is not so special

Refinement, replacement and reduction of animals in research has become a guiding principle for legisla-tion governing animal research, and for the implementation of that legislation. However, one of these ‘3Rs’, replacement, would seem incompatible with the science of animal behaviour, where the animal is not a model for the human condition, but the object of interest itself. This, the power of biomedical re-search and the pharmaceutical industry as lobbying groups, and the fact that the public could come to equate ‘animal research ’ with vivisection, should cause concern in the animal behaviour community. The dominance of the 3Rs, and the evaluation of the utility of animal research in terms of medical benefits, could come to dominate ethical decisions about animal research. I argue that the 3Rs are not as incompat-ible with the aims of animal behaviour as it first appears, and that their principles can be readily incorpo-rated into our research, but this must be twinned with a greater commitment to dialogue with legislative bodies and biomedical lobbying groups, to ensure that the utility of animal research is not evaluated solely in terms of medical and other immediate human gains