Delays in Approval Times for AUPs, Renewals and Amendments

September 2, 2021

Over the past few months, Animal Care Services (ACS) and the Animal Care Committee (ACC) have been experiencing a number of challenges that may be resulting in delays in approval times for AUPs, renewals and amendments. We apologize for any delays and inconveniences you may have encountered during this time. 

Some of the challenges would appear to be temporary and should resolve with time resulting in improvement of  approval times and these include: recent staff departures with subsequent on-boarding and  training of incoming staff, and a surge of applications, presumably attributable to research teams attempting to make up for time lost during earlier stages of the pandemic. Two additional ACC meetings were scheduled over the summer months to help with clearing the backlog of applications that have been received. 

A longer term challenge is the requirement to review all major amendments in fact-to-face ACC meetings. This has resulted in a substantial increase in the number of applications needing to be placed on agendas for review meetings and with each meeting agenda having a finite number of applications to review, has had the effect of pushing off review of  some applications to future meetings, extending the time to  approval. ACS and the ACC are working diligently to process as  many applications as quickly as possible and strategizing as to how the workload can be processed more quickly and efficiently moving forward.

We appreciate your patience at this time and encourage those Principal Investigators that have submitted or will submit applications that have legitimate, demonstrable time constraints to reach out to us at acc@uoguelph.ca in order that we can do our best to meet your timeline.

Shortage of Pentobarbital

August 10, 2021

As you may or may not be aware, there is currently a global shortage of pentobarbital-based euthanasia products for animals that is expected to persist for approximately the next 12 months – see Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC) announcement. If your primary method of euthanasia is via the use of pentobarbital overdose you should anticipate the need to move to an alternate approved method when supply is short. The CCAC, CVMA and AVMA all provide resources for alternate methods of humane euthanasia that do not require pentobarbital and the links to these resources can be found at the end of this email and in the attached document. 

As a reminder, all changes in euthanasia method must be submitted to the Animal Care Committee for review and approval prior to implementation. In planning research over the next several months it is critical that you ensure you have an adequate supply of pentobarbital in-hand, or have an approved alternate method with trained personnel in place, prior to acquiring animals.