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Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)

Wartburg College promotes and actively supports the ethical treatment of animals.  As such, all learning activities associated with Wartburg College that involve the use of non-human vertebrate animals must first be submitted to the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) for their review and approval.  The IACUC has no official oversight role for activities that involve invertebrate animals.  However, members of the Wartburg community who are planning on using invertebrates are welcome to use the committee as a sounding board to help discuss ethical considerations.  (Note:  The activities over which the IACUC has purview have increased compared to HARRC.  Please use these new guidelines when deciding whether or not your activity requires approval by the IACUC.)

Examples of activities that would require IACUC approval:

  • Housing of vertebrates in the animal facility, classrooms, or public spaces
  • Lab or field research involving physical interaction with vertebrates
  • Course activities involving interaction with vertebrates
  • Exhibiting of vertebrates off-campus while representing the college

Examples of situations that are exempt from IACUC oversight:

  • Any of the above that would involve only invertebrates
  • Personal pets or service animals
  • Purely observational experiments of wild animals  

Regulations Protecting Vertebrate Animal Use at Wartburg
Wartburg’s campus is listed with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship as a licensed animal welfare facility.  We are also registered with the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS) for all warm blooded animals other than birds, lab mice, and lab rats.  APHIS registration involves submission of annual reports and annual inspections. 

In keeping with APHIS requirements, the documents that guide the committee’s animal welfare decisions include:

The primary objectives of these documents are to ensure:
1) appropriate housing for animal subjects.
2) that researchers have carefully considered the applicability of their animal model.
3) that appropriate numbers of animals are used.
4) that animals are euthanized in an ethical manner.
5) that pain and distress to animal subjects is minimized.
6) that all research using vertebrate animals is overseen by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the researcher’s institution.

Resources
In addition to the two above documents of official rules and regulations, you may find the following links useful in determining ethical logistics of your experiment.

If you plan on working with rodents, you should also contact the animal facility manager for the standard operating procedures for rodent care that have already been approved by the committee.

Individuals with concerns about vertebrate research on campus are welcome to contact the animal facility manager (Dr. Samantha Larimer Bousquet: Samantha.Larimer@wartburg.edu), or the current chair of the IACUC (available at IACUC@wartburg.edu).