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Too graphic for general audiences?

Posting animal surgery techniques on social media?

Reader Question: “My grad student is seeking permission to post videos of some of our animal surgeries on JoVE, YouTube or other sites so other scientists can learn how to perform them. Is there any problem with this?”

Expert Comments:

The Materials & Methods section of most journal articles cannot substitute for someone showing and telling a scientist how to perform a research procedure. This is certainly true of animal experiments, and your grad student’s interest in posting a how-to video can help young scientists get their work going sooner and smarter, and can even help animal welfare by reducing trial-and-error in other labs on work you’ve honed in your own lab. What a great contribution to share this knowledge.

But, make sure it’s done carefully. As a laboratory-animal veterinarian, I’ve communicated with vets at other institutions about what we see as troubling how-to videos. In fact, I first learned about JoVE when a post-doc at my institution asked for my vet’s-eye assessment of a video she’d seen posted from another institution. She wanted to learn to do the particular mouse surgery being demonstrated, but couldn’t stop watching how the anesthetized mouse twitched whenever the surgeon did a manipulation.

If you or someone under your supervision is thinking of making a video and sharing your knowledge, here’s a checklist of concerns to review before the cameras start rolling:

• Does the procedure follow your IACUC protocol?
• Have the procedures been reviewed with your veterinarian?
• Does the surgery meet the NIH Guide’s standards of sterility – fur clipped, skin prepped with a proper disinfectant, sterilized instruments, performed in an uncluttered clean space?
• Will the video show and discuss peri-operative analgesic treatment for survival surgery?
• Will it show and discuss surgical after-care (fluids, warmth, quiet)?
• And, because a video is worth 10,000 words: do your animals look like they are completely anesthetized before and during any invasive procedure?

There will always be people who are opposed to any use of animals in laboratories. To be sure, they see it as their duty to watch what scientists are doing and to expose bad practices. No matter how good the surgery technique is, just doing it opens you and your lab to criticism, and so I applaud the student’s impulse to want to share expertise in the face of this. But remember that public and semi-public videos are easy to find. This video can show your commitment to responsible animal care and use — but only if you make sure that the production values include meticulous attention to animal health, welfare and pain management.

Comments by Larry Carbone, DVM, PhD, senior veterinarian and associate director of the Laboratory Animal Resource Center at the University of California-San Francisco. Carbone is author of “What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare” (Oxford University Press, 2004)

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