Is “sacrificing” a common practice after test is finished? I’m probably not supposed to be bothered by this, but still kinda feels sad. On the other hand the discovery is fascinating. I guess it’s all part of the deal.
Why not? I'd argue it's better to be bothered by it than just exclaim "ok it's for science" without any critical view. Anyway: it's extremely common especially with mice. You'd be suprised by the total numbers (which might be hard to acquire having to sift through animal-rights but the order of magnitude should be correct; I'm guessing a couple of tens of millions rodents per year in the US is ballpark correct). A bunch of reasons like what a sibling commenter says but also because you can usually not use mice which were used for experiment A in experiment B exepcting A had no influence.
In short: yes, sacrifice is common at experiment completion. Though it's done pragmatically and as an \ethically appropriate measure.
A bit longer: most brain tissue studies require extraction, fixing, staining,... of brain. so are usually done _ex vivo_ .
Even longer: But even where animal could be kept alive, it raises questions of what exactly one should do:
- Do you keep paying for, up to, years to house an animal that can't be used for anything else? (consider, if you've applied treatments to it, you likely discredit it from inclusion in other studies).
- Did your study cause long-term effects that would lead the animal to suffering were you to keep it alive?
- You probably can't release the animal: most are raised from birth in facilities, they'd not likely survive long (not that mice live very long in the wild as it is).
- Or, if you _did_ release them would they spread anything into the wild?
\ ethically appropriate is decided by ethics boards. Please don't argue with me about what is or isn't ethical animal treatment.
I think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered.
I don't think this holds. It's pretty obvious that a Thanksgiving turkey or a rotisserie chicken used to be a whole animal, but we still eat those.
Also, you really wouldn't want to eat lab animals, especially ones that have been subjected to pharmaceutical testing.
It's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life.
I've mostly just seen pictures of cows being butchered, but I did watch a rooster die when it had to be shot. It's not ideal. I still eat meat and will continue to do so until lab-grown alternatives are nutritionally and culinarily indistinguishable, and IMO what humans do for food is far more humane than what most of nature does.
I have been on a carnivore diet for some time now. I wanted to know if I was capable of butchering. With some training from a pro, I did it around 6 times(goat). Gave up on meat since.
For some reason I don't feel the same disgust with fishing, so my diet is mostly replaced with fish. Good thing about sea food is you get a lot more variety!
I don't think the corpses were eaten, they took out the parts they needed to autopsy and tossed the rest in a biohazard bag, if it's anything like labs I've worked in.