[Laboratory animals--suggestions, views, warnings].

Basic informations are given on the Central Laboratory Animal Facility at the Hannover Medical School, Lower Saxony, which served as a model for similar facilities in nearly all medical schools in former West-Germany. Centralized facilities for laboratory animals as a service for bio-medical research are meanwhile common and well established in all universities of western countries. The lack of money is, certainly the paramount limiting factor hampering a soon realization of similar central facilities at czech and slovak medical schools. Another serious obstacle which could soon emerge comes from the psychologic-ethical area. It is the emotional and unreasonable shift in the society's consciousness in western countries pertaining the use of animals for research which si promoted and perpetuated by plenty of legal and illegal actions of many potent organizations of so called animal rightists or activists or antivivisectionists. Such organizations do not yet exist in Czechoslovakia but the situation can change abruptly. The second part of this article consists in the description of the roots of such organizations and the description of their activities in the western countries in order to develop successful contra-strategies.