PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Humanities and Social Sciences
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvancing Animal Welfare Assessment: From Biomarkers to Smart Monitoring TechnologiesView all 3 articles
Building a Sustainable Framework for Laboratory Animal Welfare and Ethics Education: Challenges and Reform Strategies
Provisionally accepted
Jian Zhang*
Lingyan Zhang- Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Guiyang, China
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China has established a relatively comprehensive laws and regulations for laboratory animal welfare and ethics (LAWE). In accordance with regulatory requirements, most institutions have set up institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) to conduct ethical reviews of laboratory animal welfare. The majority of students demonstrate a high level of awareness of LAWE. However, they often lack comprehensive knowledge of the related principles and struggle to apply them in practice. This paper identifies four core challenges for LAWE education: (1) disjointed curricula; (2) undertrained faculty; (3) weak institutional safeguards; (4) an underdeveloped ethical culture. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive reform framework across four dimensions: (1) developing a "Required + Integrated + Tiered" curriculum system that combines theory with practice; (2) establishing a dual-certification mechanism and continuous training for faculty to ensure both ethical and technical competence; (3) implementing a closed-loop governance model including entry thresholds, robust IACUC review, and ongoing oversight; and (4) fostering a campus-wide ethical ecosystem through rituals, peer support, and public engagement. These reforms aim to embed ethical awareness into the entire educational process, cultivate respect for life, and build a sustainable, high-quality biomedical education system rooted in both scientific rigor and humanistic values.
Keywords: Curriculum reform, Ethical culture, Ethics education, Institutional governance, laboratory animal welfare
Received: 03 Oct 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jian Zhang
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