Animal Welfare Information Center Resources
The 1985 amendments to the Animal Welfare Act established the Animal Welfare Information Center (AWIC), an information service at the USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL). AWIC’s mission is to provide information pertinent to employee training that could prevent unintended duplication of animal experimentation and on improved research methods that could reduce or replace animal use and minimize pain and distress to animals.
AWIC provides information to the toxicology community on the NAL website related to the development and use of alternatives to toxicity testing, as well as information and guidelines on mandatory and regulatory testing set by various agencies. These web pages highlight peer-reviewed publications and other online resources that discuss ways to replace, reduce, and refine animal use in toxicity testing. For example, AWIC provides links and selected citations (updated in 2021) on 3Rs testing methods used in ecotoxicity testing.
During 2020 and 2021, 256,208 people visited the AWIC website. These visits generated a total of 512,253 page views. AWIC also provides information on animal use alternatives through outlets such as presentations and posters, workshops, webinars, and conference exhibits. Through these outlets, AWIC presented to over 3,590 participants at 67 different outreach events in 2020 and 2021, collectively. At these outreach events, AWIC described best practices for searching and finding current literature on methods to reduce, refine, or replace animal use in testing and experimentation.