Ethics

We say NO to animal experiments

We will never conduct any animal experiments that result in stress, pain, disease or death of any animal. This is what makes us stand out from many other organizations claiming to help cats through scientific research. None of the cats at Cowboy Cat Ranch are kept in cages. Founders Sebastiaan Bol and Evelien Bunnik have been successful biomedical scientists studying human disease (HIV/AIDS and malaria) since the beginning of their academic career in 2007 and 2004, respectively, but always refused to conduct experiments with animals. 

For our research we do behavioral tests with cats, but only designed such that they do not result in stress, pain, disease or death. Often times, the cats enjoy participating, for example in our studies where we evaluated the response of cats to cat-attracting plants and their volatile single compounds. In addition, we use left-over material from blood draws collected at veterinary clinics for diagnostic purposes, or tissues from deceased cats. Furthermore, we conduct systematic reviews–an authoritative summary of all knowledge on a specific topic written after critically evaluating all published records on that topic–for which no animals are required. 

The cats are like children to us. The reason we adopted them was to allow them to live a happy and healthy life by letting them be cat as much as possible. To facilitate this, we have created two large outdoor enclosures (51 squared meters total) with permanent access, mounted 83 meters of wall shelves, created 10 cat portals (small openings allowing the cats to move from one room to another, often at the height of the wall shelves) and we have purchased over 40 large cat trees. 

Founders Sebastiaan Bol and Evelien Bunnik have been eating mostly plant-based food since their teens predominantly for animal welfare reasons. While the cats at Cowboy Cat Ranch love to nibble on fresh cat grass, they are fed dead animals, but every time a can is opened, it hurts. It is a dilemma many fellow animal lovers will recognize.

We aim to do GOOD science

More and more people distrust science* and this is not only the result of misbeliefs about academia, but can also be attributed to scientists who do bad science and the media wanting to sell stories. Bad science results in publications that cannot be trusted because of financial conflict of interest, because the scientific methods are flawed (unintentionally or deliberately), or because data were deliberately manipulated with the goal to get the work published.
* Since 2021 the percentage of Americans that has not much or no trust in science increased from 10-15% to about 25% (Pew Research Center). 

We DO

• rigorous scientific research,

• carefully read cited articles to check claims made by authors,

• collaborate,

• welcome suggestions from peers,

• use controls,

• show all data points in figures,

• make all the raw data publicly available as supplementary online material,

• publish all our findings, positive or negative,

• cite original articles, not reviews, giving credit to the authors who deserve it,

• give credit to everyone who contributed to a publication, either via authorship or in the acknowledgements, and

• publish Open Access* so everyone in the world can read our articles for free.
  * If our funds allow. Click here to learn more about publication fees.

We DON'T

• draw conclusions that are not supported by our data,

• "salami slice" our research findings into multiple small publications to artificially increase our scientific output,

• submit our manuscripts to journals from publishers with a questionable or bad reputation, also known as predatory or pseudo journals, where acceptance of the manuscript for publication is near guaranteed, irrespective of the outcome of the peer review,

• submit our manuscripts to commercial publishers, and

• artificially inflate the number of citations of our publications by citing irrelevant work or requesting citations as a peer-reviewer.

Our ethics committee

Our ethics committee serves as an instrumental advising body to resolve any ethical disputes. We are grateful for the time and dedication of the committee members.