Um…I think you’re assuming a lot about what I meant by “animal nut.” What cute animals? What protection? Huh?
By animal nut, I mean I love animals, enjoy animals, have many pets (lessee–two cats, two turtles, two snakes, a horse, and a 45gal tank full of fish), have grown up with pets, adore my pets, and consider zoologist my favored alternate career path.
I ensure my pets all have excellent medical care as well as general daily care (and pettins). I cannot imagine life without critters. But. I am not a “pet parent” or the like. My beloved pets are animals. In an extreme (to hyperbolic) hypothetical situation where my family was facing starvation, I would slaughter them all for food. (Well, or have them slaughtered since I have no idea how.)
And FTR, rats can be darn cute. The ones I routinely feed my snakes have alternated between not ugly to downright “Awwww!”
I am a hell of a hypocrite - I don’t think I could break the rat’s back myself, but I fully support other people doing it for me. I just don’t like to think about it. Yes, I’m an asshole. I’ve come to terms with it.
I can’t even stand to go fishing. Not even killing the fish - I don’t like to put the hook in the worm or cricket. If I had to kill a deer because we were starving, I’d do it, but I sure wouldn’t like it. I’m sure I’d cry.
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth – oh and crack some rat spines, those bastards…”
“Imagine that you are creating the fabric of human destiny with the object of making man happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature. Would you consent to be the architect under these conditions?”
Interesting question- would you build happiness on the tears of a child?
Mankind’s got a few problems, let’s exploit everything we can get our hands on to ensure we totally overrun the planet. Hope our descendents like living in a desert.
I’m not sure I could do it personally; too squeamish. But that’s a personal emotional objection not a rational one; I’ll let the less squeamish types do it.
An irrelevant question because rats aren’t children.
The specialized breeds of rats used in research wouldn’t even exist without humans. Nor is there a rat shortage in the world. So no, spinal research on rats isn’t going to destroy the world.
Indeed. A lot of research involves rats and mice that have been bred or genetically manipulated to have whatever condition the reseachers are studying.
I work in a lab that studies spinal cord injury, and we don’t exactly “break their backs.” There are strict rules about what we’re doing, and we have to have a protocol approved by our Animal Care and Use Committee every time we want to do a set of experiments.
What happens with a spinal cord injury model is that we make a small hole in the spinal column, then either use an impactor (a machine that applies a controlled amount of force to the spinal cord to produce a mild, moderate or severe injury), or we do a hemisection experiment, in which the nerve fibers are severed, interrupting the connections, or we’ll do an excitotoxic lesion with a chemical that kills the neurons. Afterwards, the rats are given pain meds and kept on heating pads, and we give them easier to eat food and water (or injections if necessary). We don’t actually often have to do injuries that result in full hindlimb paralysis, but we take the best care of the animals that we can. Everyone here is very conscientious, but I’ve been at other institutions where that’s less true.
That being said, I’m really glad 95% of my work is tissue culture. I can do animal work, but it’s not easy, and the first time I had to work with rats (injecting pseudorabies virus into their brains, which is just as awful as it sounds), I didn’t think I could go back after the first day I did a perfusion. But I did. I do think what we do is valuable, but it’s not like it’s fun.
We had a permanent postdoc (a guy who was in his fifties and still a postdoc) who would, in tumor studies, allow the tumors to get to repulsive sizes (well above the allowed limit), thinking if they just went far enough, he would see a difference. To avoid detection, he started removing the mice from the animal facility and keeping them under his desk. He also bled mice by slitting their throats, which is not allowed.
On that note, eye bleeds (which is actually how you get blood from a mouse) without anasthesia is not going to fly at a company, but was very common in academia and was actually how I learned the technique.
Animal models are not as easily done in industry either. It’s probably because they are expensive, I have no illusions! But, I have to jump through a lot of hoops to get an animal study started that even as a graduate student in academia, I would just perform on a whim. And, much of the work is performed by dedicated, and specifically trained, in vivo people.
Not to mention general cleanliness. We’ve actually had some trouble running colitis models because our animal facilities are too clean (in industry) and bacteria actually greatly affects the progression of the disease. I gagged my first day in graduate school when I entered a mouse room, but in industry there is only faint odor of animals.
I’d happily break a rat’s back if it meant my husband could walk again. I’d break my dog’s back and your dog’s back too. There’s not much I wouldn’t do, really, if it meant my husband could walk again. God bless the scientists who are trying to figure out how to fix severed spinal cords. Their reserach will probably never help my husband, but I hope someday it will help someone else’s husband (brother, wife, sister, etc.).
I don’t know where you went to school, or how long ago, but academic standards are not that low at my institution. Your institution had a really crappy IUCAC committee or animal facility, IMHO.
I have never done retro-orbital puncture without anesthesia.
Our animal facility here is very clean and maintained very well, the AC staff is made up of veterinarians and vet techs as well as animal care techs. Each lab and their protocol is reviewed internally before approval. We are not allowed to remove animals from the animal facility, we perform the experiments in their rooms or sacrifice the mice and take what we need to do the experiments. Animals are inventoried daily, missing animals must be accounted for (either in the freezer euthed, in their cage or in a surgery room).
We have very rigorous standards to maintain. No one I work with would ever jeopardize their animal license by engaging in that type of behavior (not to mention it is cruel). If I personally knew of that type of behavior going on in a lab, I would certainly report it.
Do they not put the rat under and make a surgical cut rather than just grasp the rat and snap it in two, though? One of those methods is obviously much more humane than the other. I was under the impression that’s how it’s done (to be exact at least) when they need a broken rat bone and need to administer a drug to the rat to see how the bone heals.
I’m sure it varies place to place, don’t get me wrong! But, I had no idea that eye bleeds were supposed to be done on anything but an awake mouse until I left academia! I graduated in 2004, so not that long ago, and these were not fly by night institutions.
Yes to the OP (not as a profession, but a one-time thing). Are you kidding me about the rat/dog question? One is a rodent, the other is a domesticated pet. Pigs have higher thought processes than either dogs or cats, but I’d torture a pig before a dog. It’s a matter of how close the animals are to people psychologically. If you have some strange fondness of rats, I’d be concerned.
Yes to Cicero’s query as well. It would be hard, yes. It would probably haunt me in my dreams for years to come. But it would be worth it.
For spinal cord injuries, yes you do make a cut (I described it better in my post above). There are a ton of confounding issues that could affect a spinal cord injury and you want it to be as controlled as possible. You also want to minimize the pain to the animal, so any injury beyond the ones actually necessary to the experiment are a no-no.
Usually the cut for a spinal cord injury is only the minimum size you can make and still fit a needle or the impactor probe through. So, in a rat, maybe a few mm square.
Time magazine February 23, 1962, stated that thalidomide was released “after three years of animal tests.” The bottom line is this: more animal testing would not have prevented the release of thalidomide, because scientists would not have found the side effects. Even if they had tested the White New Zealand rabbit, thalidomide would have still come to market since the vast majority of species showed no ill effect from the drug.
Don’t get me wrong, I support humane animal research and indeed perform some animal based research myself, but animal testing has to be combined with human trials for medical purposes.