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Categories of Welfare Impact: Institutional Support
On February 1, 2024, the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) published the CCAC guidelines: Categories of welfare impact. As these guidelines represent a fundamental shift for the CCAC and certified institutions, the CCAC will provide guidance materials, including webinars, national workshop sessions, and support messages, to help program participants prepare for the 2030 implementation date.
The new categories of welfare impact guidelines have a six-year implementation timeline, with the expectation that certified institutions develop an implementation plan by the third year. This will allow all program participants the time they need to prepare for the implementation of the categories of welfare impact in 2030.
Between now and 2030, institutions must continue to categorize their protocols using the current CCAC’s categories of invasiveness in animal experiments and submit their annual animal use data to the CCAC using categories of invasiveness and not the categories of welfare impact.
The CCAC guidelines: Categories of welfare impact is aligned with two other recently published guidelines documents: the CCAC guidelines: Animal welfare assessment and the CCAC guidelines: Identification of scientific endpoints, humane intervention points, and cumulative endpoints. These documents will figure substantially in the new method of animal use data collection that is currently in preparation by the Animal Use Data Working Group. However, until 2030 when both the new animal use data collection method and the categories of welfare impact guidelines come into effect, institutions must continue to categorize their protocols and submit their annual animal use data using the CCAC’s categories of invasiveness.
Should you have any questions about the CCAC guidelines: Categories of welfare impact and its implementation, please contact us at .