I Was an Animal Experimenter
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
Any type of animal experimentation must be accompanied by an IACUC protocol that is approved by a committee, typically at least 3 people, and usually including a veterinarian, research scientists, and layperson. The protocol justifies why using animals is necessary for the research and exactly how the animals will be cared for during the experiments.
Performing surgery on live animals - You have to be trained in the procedure by practicing on dead animals first. Any surgery that happens must be done under anesthesia using approved chemicals. For example, in fishes and amphibians, this is an anesthetic dose of MS-222.
Sacrificing animals - Typical standards require that the experimenter sacrifice the animal quickly & humanely, using at least 2 methods (chemical and physical) to ensure that the animal is not suffering due to a sublethal dose of your chemical. Again for fishes, this is a lethal dose of MS-222 followed by either pithing or freezing. For rodents this is usually anesthesia followed by cervical dislocation.
Experimental endpoints - You will not get your IACUC approved if you don't have a way of dealing with your live animals after your experiment is over. Simply killing them because you don't have money to keep them around is absolutely forbidden. For fishes, they get released back into the ocean or kept around for aquarium outreach purposes.
The issue of animal rights is an important one. For example I personally think that the IACUC protocols don't go far enough. Nonvertebrate animals are typically not covered by IACUC at all so this means that it is legally above the board to vivisect slugs without anesthesia. Of course you might not think that slugs deserve rights but this is a debate that needs to happen. In particular many countries do not cover cephalopods (octopuses, squids, etc) under their animal use laws..
http://www.nature.com/news/animal-rights-activists-wreak-hav...
One thing though: as far as I know (from people having worked in the US, with primates), the IACUC rules for housing like cage volume etc are still not really sufficient.
I recently completed my doctorate in Pharmacology and I have a Home Office license to perform specific surgical procedures on animals. I have training in surgery, anaesthesia and euthanasia which is routinely assessed to maintain my Home Office license.
The details of the experimental protocol that the poster lists - deprive resource, validate behaviour and reward - are probably correct, sensationalised, but correct. I say that, because this reads like the sort of pain protocols I have been involved with in the past. The simple fact is that to explore whether a pain medication works, you must inflict pain, see whether your drug modifies pain behaviour and repeat to sufficient statistical power.
The details of the experimenter dispatching (killing, euthanising ...) the animals with chloroform, en masse, in a plastic bag is a violation of his license and his colleagues license, it is not a listed method on Schedule 1 Method of Euthanasia. It is one of the facets of animal experimentation regulation that I am proud of, the humane killing of animals ensures minimal distress. The euthanasia regulation for animal experimentation are stricter than those in the food industry and far more stricter than the exemptions that religious faiths have when preparing meat.
Non-vertebrates animals are covered by the ASPA 1986 guidelines in the UK for euthanasia and commonly you must present an anaesthetic regime for all uses of laboratory animals. Octopuses are explicitly named as they are one of the oldest laboratory animals in use — they were pivotal in understanding the role of ions and ion channel pumps in nervous transmission.
I had a girlfriend who was working on a some kind of graduate neuroscience degree in the late 90's. She used to tell me stories about students, and researchers killing/maiming animals in order to carry out their experiments.
Her lab job was to kill rats in the lab(adults, and babies). She would slam their heads into a piece of granite. Some times multiple times. (btw--she had horrid dexterity)
I asked her why they didn't administer some type of anesthetic--or kill the animals humanely.
She told me they couldn't because chemicals might affect the brain, or body chemistry when analyzing the tissues.
She told me endless stories about needless experiments on animals by students and faculty. They were not doing cutting edge research. She even admitted a lot of it was validating Current studies--so students could finish their studies in order to get that advance degree.
I finally told her enough. She wasn't a bad person, just looking for the respect a advance degree in neurobiology would bring her. She wanted respect, and felt the degree would provide that.
She dropped out of the program for personal reasons(she couldn't keep up with the studies mainly) and spent the next 10 years taking party drugs in San Francisco. She is now a vegetarian.
I don't think anyone is regulating the treatment on campuses in the United States? My nephew is taking a biology class at a little college in Los Angeles. I asked them if they are still pithing frogs in order to basically show the students the heart will beat once severed from the frog. He said they are still doing this in freshman biology.
So, there are no regulations in the United States on the treatment rodents and amphibians in schools and labs. I can state that with a fair amount of confidence! (The school he dropped out of was a private liberal arts school that accepted any kid who could come up with the tuition)
We need to, at the least, stop killing animals on campuses in order to teach art student majors--biology and anatomy.
Years ago some Researcher put a plywood cover on his truck. He then filled the truck with live piglets. He then went four wheel driving. He claimed to be studying orthopedic injuries.
Why not use carbon dioxide or nitrogen asphyxiation (both are painless, the latter is 'mental traumaless') which wouldn't damage the animal at all, and which I know for a fact are the preferred methods at my old university (a fellow Ph D student was performing macular-degeneration drug treatment experiments on rabbits).
Your final anecdote is also suspect: (1) no sources. But (2), let's grant it as true: the extreme actions of one individual have never been considered adequate justification for carte blanch restriction of anything.
Well, that's one way to (mis)characterise it. Another way is to say that doing that to frogs gives the students practical knowledge in how real specimens behave, how to take care of specimens, and techniques in getting data out of an active specimen. You can watch every video and listen to endless lectures; it's still not going to help you learn to tie a ligature properly. Education involves more than the passive absorption of factoids.
Source: taught just that practical class as a TA.
NO IACUC at any university or any veterinarian would approve this.
> Years ago some Researcher put a plywood cover on his truck. He then filled the truck with live piglets. He then went four wheel driving. He claimed to be studying orthopedic injuries.
If not illegal then, this would certainly be illegal now.
> She even admitted a lot of it was validating Current studies--so students could finish their studies in order to get that advance degree.
How is validation useless?
> So, there are no regulations in the United States on the treatment rodents and amphibians in schools and labs.
If anything there is TOO MUCH regulation. There are so many hoops you have to jump through before you're allowed to do animal experiments that it's almost ridiculous at this point in several institutions. I was on a team which proposed an experiment in which we wanted to monitor the uptake of trace quantities of known compounds and their derivatives in hair. The doses would have been far below anything toxic and the only procedures were injection of the compound and shaving the rodents while they were under anesthetic. This experiment took WELL OVER A YEAR to make it through multiple animal welfare committees and for investigators to get the required training; so long that we ended up dropping the proposal all together.
Please also keep in mind that most experiments are being done on mice, animals which people have no problem killing and attacking in their homes using brutal techniques (sticky traps, terrible poisons, spring loaded traps) or feeding to their caged pets while still alive with no moral qualms whatsoever.
My kid, who also attended, said, "I'm doing my experiment on plants."
Elementary school science fair! If you want to condition your own dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, you need to fill out additional paperwork and get your vet to approve. I can only imagine what load of crap university scientists have to wade through to get any research done.
We don't need more gatekeepers dictating morality to us.
The abuses demand oversight, it is true. But that oversight does not require professional qualifications. Something that shocks the conscience of a Nobel laureate will likely also shock the conscience of high-school dropouts. The very same peer jury system that is capable of condemning a criminal human to state execution or awarding millions of dollars in civil restitution can certainly determine whether a method of sacrificing research animals to science is acceptable or not.
The same public concerns that led to the retrofit of commercial slaughterhouses with more humane Grandin animal handling systems can be applied to research animals. My suggestion is this: for any given experiment that involves potential harm or injury to animals, assemble a randomized, unbiased, volunteer jury of at least 12 people. Explain to them the goals of the experiment and the protocols, and the proposed animal involvement. If no more than 25% of the jury objects, the experiment may begin immediately. Otherwise, rewrite the protocols and try again. Ethics approval could take days instead of months.
If you entertain the possibility that an animal can suffer as much as a human being, then all the regulation in the world is not enough. Consider even the most humane animal experiment, replace the animal with a human being, and see how you feel about it. Animals are living beings that we share the planet with; let them live their lives out in their natural environment. Animal experimentation should not even be contemplated, for exactly the same reason that wartime Nazi medical and eugenic experiments are condemned: for causing needless suffering in other living beings.
Regulation must strike a compromise between allowing research to continue with enough oversight to limit abuse. It is the sort of compromise developers use with security; enough to limit abuse, but not too much that no-one can use the system!
The fear to touching flesh and blood of a dead animal is fine if you want to be florist, but not acceptable if your dream is to be a surgeon. No game simulator can provide you with the same experience; you need to fight against this fear and you either win or give up. Sooner is better to avoid to spend many years fading away in the wrong place doing things that you really don't want to do.
Your friend simply seem to be too depressed and unmotivated ("those experiments are useless") to see it coming and finally let this obstacle (and social environment expectatives?) to kill her dream of being a neurobiologist. A pity for her and for all the people that could have benefited of his talent.
In the 90's you could easily find a small guillotine to kill instantly and humanely a rat or a mouse in any lab. Not a lot of blood is spilled (because, well, rats are small animals) but some people just dismay and can't cope with the idea of seeing any blood. Probably the guillotine was so traumatic to her that she prefer to break the nek of the animals with a thin piece of granite instead. Guillotine fail less, but if you know how to do it, this is also acceptable. Farmers all around the world break the necks of rabbits and chickens to kill them instantly and most omnivorous people will name this as example of an humane way to dispatch them for our kitchens.
Please note that this is very different to the gross picture that you are trying to sell of a rock crushing the head of an animal repeatedly until dead. The idea that researchers squash the head of their animals with a rock before to extract the brain for study drug damages is surrealist.
I used to joke "... and then in the 60s, Ethics was invented" regarding biology experiments...
The first article you link to is about the abuse of frequentist statistics, it is not a piece of nonsense primary research (1182327). The article is correct and an interesting read, but not in support of poor use of animal experiments. The second article (8124111) is about clinical research, not pre-clinical animal research although the arguments raised in the article are applicable to pre-clinical research. It is very difficult to find and expose nonsense research!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15509386
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18410164
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/11902612_Effects_of_...
I personally am about to embark on a scientific project that ultimately leads to animal experimentation. It's the development of a chemotherapeutic. Perhaps it's a self-serving thing to say, but I think that's one of the few places where animal experimentation makes sense; even the next-generation anticancer drugs, which recruit the immune system, don't make sense to be tested in mice, because in order to transplant the cancer cells, you have to start with immune-system-less mice (otherwise the cancer gets depleted by the mouse's own immune system).
Monkeys have immune responses that are as similar to humans as we can hope for. Further, Mice while they have some conservation of immune related genes there are many divergent expression of immune related genes including alterations in master-gene (cis) and innate immune gene (CD4) expression [1] which may explain why they don't translate very well into humans. We have an awful time trying to get decent responses to allergic stimuli with mice and guinea pigs! Rodents have very robust immune systems in my experience.
There is a very large body of research that couldn't and can't be done without animal experiments. Both in fundamental and clinical sciences.
However, what I do see is a movement away from usage of macaques towards a higher usage of experiments using flies. Rodents are fundamental in neuroscience and will stay that for a while, as they are both easy to genetically modify and have reasonably sized brain and organs that is comparable to ours.
I've seen several people, PhD students, but also top-level scientists, moving away from using animals or mammals for their experiments because of the same realization that the author had. It's important that we realize what we are doing to the animals, but the end of animal experimentation is not yet in sight.
It's a sort of ethical math. Most people don't do the math because it's not obvious that some thought is needed, instead going with their gut feeling.
My parents work in the field and I have worked at a few labs where they do animal experimentation. It's not as bad as the press makes it out to be. People don't work around animals their entire lives without caring about them.
Besides, it's my own take on the book, and perhaps Mark Rowlands wouldn't even recognise it from my description. Perhaps I didn't do it justice.
You can care for the well being of animals without completely ruling out animal experimentation. For instance, you could say, "the well being of animals is important, but less important than saving human lives".
But the lowest hanging fruit is killing animals for meat. Mainly for the joy of having a nice taste in their mouth people who don't really need it eat vast quantities of clever, sentient animals who lead miserable, short lives. The trade off seems easy to me.
I wasn't really looking for an argument about animal rights, though if you really want to get into it, my foundational moral principles are that morality is fundamentally reciprocal in nature, and since animals are incapable of reciprocation, morality doesn't apply to them; a dog isn't immoral for biting a toddler to death (though it may very well be poorly trained), nor am I immoral for eating a delicious double bacon cheeseburger; regardless of the "cleverness" or "sentience" of the cattle and pigs I'm eating, they are fundamentally incapable of morality and so there is no moral significance to anything they experience.
As for your second paragraph, I don't think it stands up to scrutiny.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it was considered horrible to perform experiments on humans.
What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that those human beings were in fact "inferior" human beings.
I don't know if you eat fish, chicken and so on, but probably you don't think of yourself as a Nazi if you would. Because you don't consider a chicken at the same level as a human. And this gives you carte blanche to have chicken for dinner and feel absolutely no remorse.
Is it right or wrong? I don't pass judgment. I know all beings have a sense of self and we shouldn't cause pain and take a life for no reason, yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life.
I know that if we consider life sacrosanct and we eat chicken fingers at Chipotle, we need ideology to justify our actions, and so we'll consider animals inferior. If we consider them inferior, they'll be target for experiments, because medical science will continue to evolve.
Depending on how our culture evolves, the moral compass may move in an entirely different direction, where we stop regarding life of any kind as so precious, even human. We'll acknowledge how replaceable we are, and our mortality. This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward.
You never know.
I'm not sure what "the cycle of life" is, but just because something may be present elsewhere in the animal kingdom does not mean we should replicate it or justify our actions through it.
The pattern that I see is that society is giving moral value to groups that have less power; groups that we have historically harmed without thought.
We must define "group" though, because obviously the most powerless things on this planet are plants and inanimate, nonliving objects. And it would be very short-sighted to define "group" as "everything that society currently gives moral value, i.e. all humans and an arbitrary subset of animals". I define "group" as persons that can feel emotion (not necessarily human emotion), have some sense of their environments, and have some sense of desire. In short, our "group" includes all sentient beings.
If we follow this line of thought, it feels obvious that all sentient beings will be recognized as valuable. And that the question is not "if", but "when".
I want to address your counter example:
> This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward.
As a society, we believe that a moral being does not have the right to take their own life. It doesn't say anything about who is or isn't a moral being, which is what I am addressing.
The counter example you were looking for was a society where all humans had no moral value. If humans have no moral value, then it does not matter if a human kills themselves, because it also doesn't matter if humans kill and harm each other.
Disclaimer: I have lived my entire life in the United States. When I say "society", I usually mean "the west".
Why should animal suffer for human? Well human have higher moral value because of higher ability of pain, emotions and cognition.
Don't get me wrong given the choice I would stop any animal cruelty if there would be alternative. As far as I know there isn't one. We can't just simply switch to some computer simulation for testing drugs instead of testing them on live animals unfortunately.
So stopping animal testing entirely doesn't seem to me to be right, but we should take a closer look at it. Be extremely careful that any harm done to animals is justified, that research being done on them really brings benefits and that we are doing best we can to relieve as much pain as it is possible.
I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good.
Assume that in the near future, we give nonhuman animals the same moral value as humans. And then say we wanted to conduct an experiment on an animal to cure a human ailment. Before we harm a nonhuman animal, we need to ask whether we have the right to harm that animal. Because nonhuman animals and humans have the same moral value, this is equivalent to asking whether we would have the right to harm a human in the same position.
So right off the bat, our standard for conducting tests on animals is, "would we have the right to conduct this test on a human?"
Let's also assume that we believe humans must give consent before we have the right to conduct scientific experiments on them. If we apply this to animals, then we need to determine how to get consent from an animal, which seems hairy. And then there's the question of fairness -- if we've already determined that we have the right to perform this test on a human, and we're trying to cure a human ailment, then isn't it selfish to perform the experiment on a nonhuman animal?
But, you may say, what if the gains outweight the cost? If we truly believe that we will gain enough to justify violating the rights of a nonhuman animal, that's consistent with justly violating the rights of a human. And then the question of selfishness comes up again.
> I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good.
I believe they are both big issues. My only advice is to be careful not to fall into the trap of classifying one as a less evil (even though it seems that harming animals for our enjoyment is much worse than harming them out of necessity). If we fight to recognize the moral value of nonhuman animals on all fronts, then the world you wish for (only performing experiments out of extreme necessity) will come too. (This is not a personal jab at you -- it's something I noticed in my own thinking, too.)
But you can win any argument by first granting that it must be true, which is what you do in your second paragraph.
If we disagree on that point, then we will obviously reach different conclusions and there is no point in arguing with each other. That is why I stated it as an assumption.
It's illogical to grant them equivalent rights (right to vote, basic education, etc.) but there's nothing illogical in granting non-human animals rights that are relevant to them.
There's a distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings. If it is accepted that an animal experiences pain and distress, and have the innate desire to seek comfort and avoid pain, then the logical thing to do is to grant them the right to be kept from intentional harm, just like we do with human animals, regardless of their cognitive abilities (we don't exclude mentally impaired humans from our moral community).
Those are arbitrary categories. Let's say I decide you have lower ability to feel pain, emote and have inferior cognition.
How exactly do you prove me wrong. By grimacing a lot when I cause you pain? Well animals absolutely clearly demonstrate they hate pain, too. Yet, here we are discussing your opinion to the contrary.
Truth is... they don't speak, so we can speak for them whatever is convenient for us.
What about all those that don't work in a job benefitting humanity, and do so for more selfish reasons than moral?
Do we do that today? If a researcher refuses to harm an animal to further science, do we think less of them?
Well yes, we're animals. I don't understand why adults still think of humans as somehow being not animals.
I get how fish might not experience "culture shock", "weltschmerz" or "ennui", but most of the things we feel every day aren't special at all.
To reduce the more diverse type of vertebrates, with more than 30.000 extant species, to the behaviour of a goldfish put in a matchbox of water is extreme oversimplification. Some fishes are very intelligent in fact. Not like an human but much more than a mice or a chicken for sure. Sadly the 90% of philosophers in history just didn't understand what type of creature is a fish and the derived reasoning about those had lead to funny dead ends.
But the real problem is that "to be able to feel pain or not" or "to live in water or not" are just subjective lines (Saving lion, moral act. Saving tuna, maybe tomorrow, tunas are dumb). We could also create different laws for vegan species (cow: moral, dog: amoral), or for species that can feel love and care for his descendants (butterfly: amoral, spider: a wonderfully moral creature), or that can feel electromagnetic fields, or that have four extremities with 5 fingers at the end (human good, spider and horses amoral) or that can live longer and pacific lives (humans so-so, sequoia great). The rules of this game are totally artificial from the start.
The type of activism that repeat again and again old dated facts as if were current, is mostly a way to climb up socially at any cost, and to find comfort in the group. No intelligent people can argue that to give a expensive dinner of mouses to the wild cats equals to love or improve the life of those mouses. The peaceful and intelligent lab rats set free ceremoniously, with be soon bitten, chased away and most of them will be ripped in pieces for the wild rats before 24 h. The survivors will last a couple of more miserable days terrified, hungry, bleeding and isolated of their families. This is cruel for a social animal, and not much different to stealing a lap dog from this friend owners and house and releasing it alone in the territory of a wolf pack to be teared apart and eated.
Experimentation is mostly a tool to achieve something that a lot of good people disperately need as soon as possible. To make a taboo of this tool will not solve much of our real problems and probably will create a huge amount of human pain.
Labs should have sticks with "Is the Thalidomide, stupid" printed in uppercases, and those type of articles should probably be answered also with the same slogan.
This made me smirk, because Thalidomide could be the poster child for the ineffectiveness of animal testing.
Eventually they showed up in a particular strain of rabbits.
But hey, that was long ago.
"Lasagna [157] commented that once a chemical is known to cause birth defects in humans, an animal species or strain can usually be found that will replicate the response, but that this is not the same as prospectively predicting this response."
Lucey and Behrman. 1963. Thalidomide: effect upon pregnancy in the rhesus monkey. Science 139:1295-1296.
Hendrickx, Axelrod and Clayborn. 1966. 'Thalidomide' syndrome in baboons. Nature 210 (5039):958-959.
"Delahunt and Lassen induced typically malformed foetuses in four of seven pregnant Cynomolgus monkeys which were treated after implantation had already occurred"
Hendrickx, A. G., and L. Newman. 1973. Appendicular skeletal and visceral malformations induced by thalidomide in bonnet monkeys. Teratology 7 (2):151-159. doi:10.1002/tera.1420070206.
Please note the year of the articles. The studies with monkeys were made after the drug was distributed in many countries and thousands of babies without legs and arms started to born, not before.
Let suposse that a mass murder kills 5000 babies, and mutilates other 5000. There will be a trial, right?, this is serious stuff. A complex trial with thousands of victims waiting for justice.
Will the lawyer of the victims, jump in this legal battlefield like going for a picnic, and show triumphant their one and only proof?("rabbits, didn't feel the need to investigate further because science is evil").
Will someone tell the police, "stop doing interviews, replicating the crime scene, looking for witness, asking the experts, we have one hint!. Dismiss the other proofs"?
Do you understand know, why a lot of work and experiments have to be done? Because there was dozens of trials in 46 countries and you need to know the truth without the slightest shadow of a doubt.
Why do cats play with mice? Are cats evil?
I don't mean to be too harsh, but the thing that comes through loudest to me is that, by his own measure, Paul may be a bad person.
Humans suffer horrible lives naturally too, and on a much more massive scale. If you're really against human suffering and dying then a far bigger problem is the existence of humans with peak populations, unreliable food supplies, murderers, fights and disease. Stopping research on humans is like trying to stop global warming by driving slower. Feels like you're making a difference but you're not.
Scale down that number to find where you think the line is.
If an advanced alien species came to Earth, how would I want them to treat humans? How about in the case that they are advanced to a level that comparing their abilities and technology to humans would be the same as comparing human technology and abilities to that of birds or dogs or cows?
Would I want them to dismiss our primitive (from their perspective) nests as the work of an unintelligent beast? Would I want them to corral us into pens and feed us fattening foods before harvesting our bodies? Would I want them to feed us hormones and genetically modify our bodies to produce more milk or grow larger muscles for consumption? Would I want them to breed the outliers of our species to create extremely large and extremely small "pure-breeds" of humans as a novelty? Would I want them to dismiss our primitive verbal communication as nothing more than cheerful song and make no attempt at all to understand what we are trying to express?
Animal studies are even required to refine the science needed to move beyond animal studies. Ethics and morality aside, studies employing animals are expensive and time-consuming. Given the choice, scientists would much rather experiment on cells in a dish, or on slabs of unfeeling cultured tissue, or upon simulations of animals, if these methods would generate results of the same quality.
In comparison to what might be and what is possible, we live in a barbaric age of suffering, war, death, and sundry other horrors that we like to keep behind the curtains and out of the mind's eye. But barbaric as it is, this age is far better than the past by all such measures. We no longer absolutely, definitely need to slaughter animals for food to sustain the populace, for example, and rates of violence between humans are far lower than in the pre-modern era of tribes and universal poverty. The option stands open today for a society of vegetarians: it is practical from a technological and economic standpoint. That we have not moved rapidly in that direction is our shame, and our descendants will look back on us as savages for this and many other reasons.
Those people who criticize and take action against the use of animals in medical research should first look to their diets, and then to the practice of farming animals. Vast and expansive animal suffering is caused in the name of putting meat into the marketplace - greater many times over each month than in all the animal experiments in modern history. Persuade the omnivores of the human race to relinquish their participation in the meat market before savaging the medical science that will benefit both man and beast.
In short, the human condition is a rotted, cloying swamp, but we're closer to the edge than we were - no longer up to our necks in it, we now have the luxury of finding more of our surroundings to be disgusting and primitive. The way out to solid ground is forward, through more of the same, until our biotechnology becomes good enough to do away with the suffering we must inflict upon animals in order to build better medicine. Perhaps along the way, societies will arise whose members also reject the needless suffering we presently choose to inflict upon animals in order to eat the same diet as our ancestors.