Dear Colleagues:

I'm writing in search of informational support. One of my tasks is oversight
of the campus animal laboratories, and we have an emergency response problem
that I'm trying to solve.

At present, if an after-hours emergency occurs in the labs, only public
safety has the authority to summon maintenance. Our campus police, like
many, have a turnover problem because of low pay, which means that the
after-hours officers typically have little experience, and so are given
rigid procedures to follow for various eventualities. It doesn't matter if
somebody with expertise shows up, the police decide what steps are and
aren't taken to remedy the problem. This completely ties the hands of the
lab personnel, and could -- has, in fact, before my tenure in this office --
result in harm or death to lab animals.

For example, in one case a little over a year ago, a heater thermostat went
out, locking the heater "on." I was called at home, and arrived to find that
a rat colony was at 95 degrees F and climbing fast. The animals were clearly
heat-stressed, but it was near zero outside, so the options for moving them
were limited. I was told that maintenance had been paged but had not
responded. I instructed the officer on duty to go to the next step in the
procedure, paging a maintenance supervisor at home; he refused, on the
grounds that the required 20 minutes to wait without a response hadn't yet
passed. (Never mind that he hadn't recorded the time of the original page.)
In short, the system response didn't make sense, as somebody with no
expertise was controlling the responses, and all he had the authority to do
was follow a predetermined checklist. {I was able to moderate the
temperature through a series of Rube Goldberg contraptions, which sort of
worked until technicians finally arrived over an hour after I did, we didn't
lose all the rats, but several pregnant rats aborted litters, disrupting a
few projects.}

This setup clearly violates the spirit of the animal care guidelines, in
that the laboratory personnel who are responsible for the well-being of the
laboratory animals do not have the requisite authority to instigate
corrective action when needed. I am convinced it puts us out of compliance
with the letter of the animal care guidelines as well; I think I can change
our system for the better if I can identify the specific rules that this
breaks. In my real job as a professor, I've done animal research for a long
time, which means that my understanding of the regulations is now intuitive
and I don't know my way around the books as well as I should in this job.

Can anybody point me to the right rules? Thanks in advance for your help and
any advice you can offer.

Michael Renner

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Michael J. Renner, Ph.D.
 Interim Associate Vice President, Academic Affairs
Professor of Psychology
West Chester University
West Chester, PA 19383

xxxxxx@wcupa.edu
Telephone: 610-436-3310
Fax: 610-436-2763
http://www.wcupa.edu/_facstaff/facdev/
"The path of least resistance is always downhill."
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