Diets

The experiment that I’m working on is pretty commonly referred to as a feeding trial. Basically what this means is that our experiment will consist of different diet adjustments. These diet adjustments try to only change one specific thing between diets in order to be able to attribute differences observed during the experiment to these diet changes, thus increasing our understanding of what impact the things we feed has on product quality, product safety, animal health and the environment. It is a very rewarding area of animal science to be researching for me because I feel like the knowledge we can gain in this field is limitless in its potential real-world applications. In our case we will be formulating one diet from which different additives will be put in. We hope to determine which added ingredient is best for encouraging healthy growth and behavior of pigs while improving the safety of our human food supply. Keep in mind that all of the ingredients we are testing have already been proven to be safe and beneficial for consumption by animals, and also safe for ultimate human consumption. We just want to know which is most beneficial.

A struggle with feeding trials over the years is that occasionally something other than just the treatment gets inadvertently changed. In my field of study, I’ve seen growth performance of pigs attributed to a diet ingredient and then people later discovered that they gave extra protein or energy to one of the groups. This can have a big impact on what happens during the experiment! These confounded results can have very little value to science if the variables cannot be sorted out and I don’t want this to happen to me. To avoid this, we spent last week balancing diets based on current ingredient listings that we have available to us. We made the diets as simple as possible and used a programmed spreadsheet to ensure that every requirement of the pig is met in the diet. Then we edited ingredients between treatments to make sure that they were balanced as well. By balancing for energy, we created “isocaloric” diets which we also balanced for protein.

But it’s much more complicated than that. Feed ingredients also have different digestibility values once fed and can have interactions between ingredients. This is where it becomes important to understand feed ingredients and to have properly analyzed the feed for the values we used in the calculations. Scientific research over the years has established a lot of ratios that we need to follow to ensure that the animals we are feeding have the nutrition they need to be healthy for the trial and also balanced between treatments in the experiment.

All sounds kind of complicated, right? Well this is a simplified version of what really goes on, and this same nutrient balancing is what is done for all of the animals that live on farms today. Some people think that we should return to the “natural” way of producing animals, that we have overcomplicated the issue and that this isn’t good for the animals. While I understand peoples’ concerns about complicated diets, simple things aren’t always good. Pasture and free range doesn’t provide everything that an animal needs to live, just like vegetarianism cannot provide all of the nutrients that humans need to be healthy. We need to supplement this intake with protein, vitamins and minerals (naturally found in animal products) in order to be as healthy as we can be. And the same kind of supplementation is important for animals.

Now, we could just throw out a mineral block and call it good, but with all of the science and knowledge that we have today, that would be underutilizing technology. By using the technology we’ve developed, we can provide so much better care to the animals we raise. And this is why farmers go to great lengths to balance out nutrients with proper analysis to make sure that they are providing everything that an animal needs to be healthy and survive. They go to complicated lengths to make the right decisions for the animals which ultimately put food on your table.

Approval! (duplicate post)

Great news came in today! My project has been approved by the IACUC review committee. I was getting pretty skeptical since we hadn’t heard anything recently and I was starting to get worried about how long we would have to wait to hear back. Then this morning we got a query about correcting a typo and I was even more worried. Were we going to have to go through correcting every typo before the protocol was finally approved? But thankfully it finally came in this afternoon. And none too early.

Logistical issues have already caused us to need to readjust the plan a few times. Nothing ever can work out quite as planned and there is a plethora of research projects out there. Each one says something just a little bit different with slight changes in methods and results. In an effort to streamline the project and eliminate animal stress (including the humans working on this project), and to make sure that this project has real benefit and applicability to society and animals, we keep reevaluating the project details. And while the animal care protocol is approved, this is only the beginning.

The animal care protocol is only for assuring the least harm to the animal and appropriate care and contingency planning for the whole project. Although it is very important to make sure that research projects responsibly minimize impact on the lives of animals, it is also very important to make sure the project has important meaning to the furthering of science. So what still remains are all of the little details. Details that include the exact percentages of feed ingredients, the exact measurements to the inches of the pens, the exact times and camera positions for observations. And again, all of this is based on the literature and findings of all the people before me. As things go on, I will try to keep you updated on the different parts that go into a simple research project.

IACUC and Animal Research

This week marks the submission of my IACUC proposal which has been a much larger endeavor than I had originally supposed. For those of you who don't know, IACUC is an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and every research institution has one of these committees. The main purpose of the committee is to oversee research that deals with animals and ensure the animals' well-being by reviewing the protocols and making sure that the animals will be well cared far, that the research has a practical use in today's society, that animals will not be wasted needlessly in this research and that there isn't some crazy professor doing horrendous things to animals in the name of science.

What the IACUC committee is looking for is to see for starters that the researcher is and will be providing adequate daily care and alleviation of pain and illness for the duration of the project. Even if animals will die at the end of a project there is no justification for failing to provide adequate care to them before then. The IACUC committee is also checking to see if this research is applicable to mankind. How will the research benefit us as humans and what benefits does it have for animals? They also want to know if similar research has been done before. If similar research has been done before, how will this project be different? Science has a checkered past with unnecessary duplication of projects or projects that are duplicated in larger numbers just to find statistical significance so the committee wants to make sure that duplicate projects are limited and the first projects in new areas have statistical value.

All of these criteria have a specific goal of reducing research impact on animals and which focus on the 3 R's of research today: Replacement, Refinement and Reduction. Over time as we as a society have become more concerned about the experiences and plight of animals in research, the 3 R's evolved to have a central significance to responsible animal research. Each one has a specific focus and all 3 provide a cohesive body of work with which to judge the value of a research project and its impact on animal well-being. Ultimately we use the 3 R's to justify a project and its use of animals in combination with the project's assumed ultimate benefit to both animals and humans globally. Here's my understanding of the 3 R's in my own life and my obligation during research.

Replacement references the substitution of "lesser" animals, animal models or other laboratory analysis for life animals wherever possible. Refinement refers to procedures and using the best and least invasive procedures for data collection. Reduction is more of a statistical comment. It can refer to not repeating experiments needlessly as well as designing experiments in a way to use as few animals as possible so as to eliminate needless inclusion of animals in an experiment. This also helps the researchers themselves in many cases as it helps to reduce the budget for a project. Every animal fed and cared for through a project adds a cost to the project.

Animal research has provided many great benefits to humans over time, but it has also had great benefit for the animals studied as we gain a better understanding of them and can improve the care we provide to them. Ending animal research in today's society would be unreasonable and uncaring towards human patients who suffer worldwide today and even though this is something advocated by animal rights groups, we owe it to our fellow human beings to continue animal research to search for the cures to diseases from which they suffer. While I advocate caution among research projects towards the care of animals, the truth of the matter is that animal research benefits people everywhere in concerns such as increasing human food production, curing diseases, better understanding of biology and a greater appreciation to the diversity around us and I support this with all I am. As an animal scientist I am committed to providing appropriate care to the animals in my project and I am hopeful that my project can have a positive impact on our understanding of animal behavior and how we can provide good care to food producing animals while not sacrificing our ability to feed so many people with such few resources.