The goal of appropriate animal care is to:

• A. Maximize speed of experiments.
• B. Maintain strict documentation.
• C. Ensure animals are fed ad libitum.
• D. Minimize pain and distress where possible.

Answer: (D)

The main idea behind appropriate animal care is to safeguard the animal’s welfare by reducing pain and distress as much as possible. This means using proper anesthesia and analgesia for procedures, applying humane endpoints to prevent unnecessary suffering, providing housing and environmental conditions that minimize stress, and handling and monitoring animals in a way that detects problems early. This approach embodies the refinement aspect of the 3Rs, aiming to lessen suffering while still achieving scientific goals.

Other options touch on important aspects of animal care but don’t define its primary goal. Maximizing the speed of experiments can risk increased stress or insufficient analgesia. Strict documentation is essential for reliability and compliance but describes process rather than the welfare objective. Feeding animals ad libitum is a nutritional management detail and not the overarching aim of humane care.