Animal use in research is necessarily controversial, and any meaningful public debate relies on a healthy dose of openness. But openness is also required to improve that which is far from perfect – namely, our own work with lab animals. In principle, “cultures of care” in animal research should enable staff to strive for continuous improvements in animal welfare, staff welfare, scientific quality, and transparency. However, such improvements remain limited unless and until the mistakes being made in everyday work can be addressed openly and productively. To be effective, error cultures do not primarily seek to assign blame, but instead encourage openness and improvement.
While this goal is often proclaimed, and many tools e.g. for critical incident reporting are freely available, these are rarely adopted in practice, and a fear of hostile reactions persists. An online symposium we held in April 2024 sought to encourage debate among practitioners on how to address and learn from our mistakes (https://unsuck.science). Feedback from among its 500 mostly German participants suggests that more work is needed on how to overcome specific hurdles preventing cultural change in a given workplace. This is why, at FELASA 2025, we held two separate workshop sessions with a more diverse group of professionals.
