Study suggests emergency plans for animal labs should include welfare

When the power fails, the water stops or staff cannot get in, an animal facility faces two problems at once: the continuity of research and the fate of the animals in its care. An article published on 8 September 2026 in Laboratory Animal Research, by researchers in South Korea, argues that emergency preparedness should stop being seen merely as an operational requirement and be understood instead as an extension of the institution's animal welfare programme.

The authors recall that earlier events, such as Tropical Storm Allison, which flooded facilities in Houston in 2001, and the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, demonstrated the vulnerability of laboratory animal populations and the need to build welfare considerations into planning. To identify the key elements of a preparedness programme, they reviewed and compared regulatory frameworks and guidance documents from the United States, Europe, Canada and Korea, examining definitions of emergency, core components, veterinary oversight systems and decision-making structures.

Despite differences in regulatory approach and institutional context, the common elements could be organised into three functional domains: continuity of facility operations, protection of animal welfare and institutional response capacity. On that basis the authors propose an integrated preparedness framework and a stepwise operational checklist, intended to make it easier to write standard operating procedures in which welfare priorities are built into the decisions taken during an emergency. The conclusion is explicit: while prioritising personnel safety and institutional resilience, planning should also seek to minimise animal suffering and preserve the value of ongoing research when normal operating conditions cannot be maintained.

Earlier literature already addressed specific scenarios. An article published in 2018 in ILAR Journal describes disaster response planning in hazardous agent containment units as a time- and personnel-intensive task, organised in stages: planning team formation, situational understanding, goal and objective determination, plan development, preparation, and rehearsal or implementation. Specific risks, such as the type of agent and the animal species, guide goal-setting. The text further explores the difficulties of euthanising animals treated with hazardous agents and, finally, the handling of media relations after a disaster, with proactive measures to mitigate negative perceptions of research.

Not every emergency is abrupt. An account published in 2021 in Laboratory Animals notes that policies and guidelines exist for acute disasters such as earthquakes, fire and floods, but little is available for subacute disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic, which imposed major restrictions on the movement of people. The simplest options, stopping experiments and breeding or euthanising all animals, carried dilemmas: the ethical debate over euthanasia at the start of a pandemic, the loss of information from studies at advanced stages and the destruction of genetically modified strains that would be hard to replace. Two research facilities in South Africa responded by allowing only essential studies to continue, keeping small breeding colonies of essential strains, providing staff with private transport to avoid public transport, and redesigning work areas for distancing. According to the authors, the measures ensured the continued welfare of the animals during lockdown and can be adopted in future pandemics.

For anyone who runs an animal facility or sits on an animal ethics committee, the three papers converge on a practical point: the emergency plan needs to exist in writing, be rehearsed, and contain decision criteria about the animals before the decision becomes necessary. The operational checklist proposed in 2026 is in the full text of the article, which is open access.