Thoughts on Animal Experimentation

A month ago at the time of writing this, the lab I worked for had an emergency announcement at our 8:30AM Monday meeting.

After testing on rodents, the lab scientists must dispose of the bodies and leave them for a contracted company to pick up. The previous week, at the time of pickup, the team found a mouse in the bag, alive.

This was a breach of the standards of best practices, as well as something that could potentially get our lab in huge trouble. In addition, as the head of our institute repeatedly insisted, it was horrifically inhumane. The details were not discussed, but the implication was that the mouse was somehow injured or sick due to being used in a trial. It was also trapped in a plastic bag full of dead mice.

The head of the lab used language that I had never heard him use before to describe the incident. He is normally very calm and well-spoken, and he referred to the incident as 'horrible' and went on for a very long time about how this was a terrible way to treat a rodent.

As far as I can tell, this type of incident never happened again. Maybe at other labs, but not at ours.

And every day, the cafe downstairs served meat produced from livestock that were almost certainly treated far, far worse than the mouse left alive inside the bag.

Some thoughts on omnivorism and compartmentalization

Now to be clear, the point of this is not to persuade people to stop eating meat. I personally have not eaten meat (unless somebody offers me their food and I want to be polite) since I was 17, with two exceptions: the first few months after I started testosterone, when I temporarily morphed into Pac-Man, and another time when I was going out with a girl who ate lots of meat and I was trying to seem chill. I have my priorities, okay?

If you are curious, things did not work out between me and the aforementioned carnivorous lady.

However, I don't think there are many folks these days who require additional facts presented to them in order to get them to stop eating meat. Everybody knows the basic facts of how the meat industry works, and we don't live under a system where ethical consumption is possible. I know where my clothes likely came from, but I don't walk around naked.

From what I can tell, very few people who eat hot dogs are actually ignorant of the hot dog production process. People eat hot dogs because humans are good at forcing temporary ignorance upon themselves when it is beneficial. That is the only reason we can get by in the chaotic universe we live in, which is currently undergoing a climate crisis and massive unrest.

The point I'm trying to make is that the universe of animal experimentation is completely different from the universe of meat production. It is as if the animals involved in those processes are completely unrelated to each other. Both legally, in practice, and in the world of public opinion.

The world of animal testing

The world of lab experimentation is not all horrific torture stories. Yes, there are some animals that die. Some die in ways that are painful. But that is the minority of cases.

Many of the experiments we conduct leave the guinea pig alive post-surgery. Recently, one guinea pig died during a procedure where it should not have, which forced the graduate student to undergo extensive additional training to prevent a recurrence. Granted, this extra training is not going to bring the guinea pig back to life, but it is far more than the repercussions of when a farm animal is mistreated. Sometimes rodents are intentionally killed, which is referred to as 'sacrificing,' which I think is supposed to sound better than 'killing,' but to me it always sounds like we are running a cult.

Experiments typically involve nonlethal procedures being done on the animals while they are unconscious, or they involve killing the animal as painlessly as possible and experimenting on the corpse.

Experiments that involve, for example, making the animal sick to see if a treatment is viable, certainly exist. However, they represent the minority of animal studies.

USDA-Regulated Animals

When a USDA-regulated species is involved, things become even more complex. We employ a technician whose sole job is to do paperwork involving our large USDA animals because if a procedure involving a USDA animal goes against regulations, our whole lab is screwed.

A USDA-regulated animal is defined as any warm-blooded animal that is not a rodent or bird. Interestingly, invertebrates are not even considered animals, so you can basically do whatever you want to them. The technician in our lab mostly deals with paperwork involving our research on pigs.

Think about how absurd that is. Pigs in industrial farming situations are treated atrociously. I am not going to link to any articles or videos on this because you can look it up yourself and you probably already know about this sort of thing, but even organic, humane farming has been shown to be awful. And yet, we employ a technician whose sole responsibility is pig welfare.

I went to undergrad at a major agricultural university that raised cows. Those cows were notably thinner than the cows I had seen in farms (growing up we often drove through the Central Valley in California, where there were slaughterhouses). According to the veterinary students, this is because rather than corn, these cows were fed a very nutritious diet to ensure that they were in peak health. Research cows are literally treated better than American school students. Granted, that's not a high bar, but still.

Some concessions

I want to be very clear that I am not necessarily advocating for more animal research. There is certainly some research which we should be doing quite a bit less of, and some of which we should probably be doing none of at all.

One example of this is primate research. This is less directly comparable to farming since we do not raise primates for meat, but even so, it is worth mentioning that primate research is not conducted to as high a standard as it should be. My friend, who is getting her PhD at a school with a huge primate research lab and is involved in labs that conduct primate research, suspects that it is because professors who are used to maintaining the welfare of rodents don't really know what to do with a large animal. They are treated better than most factory-farmed animals, but I will concede that it is more harmful than it has to be.

Another caveat is that while in theory, all scientists are doing their work for the good of humanity, in reality, humans are motivated by a variety of factors. Being a biomedical researcher doesn't have the greatest money-to-hours-worked ratio, but it is a respectable position, and many people are very prestige motivated. As such, sometimes scientists conduct experiments primarily to advance their careers. There should be (and to an extent there is), a system in place that only allows for animal experimentation when it benefits humanity in a very significant way.

One way to do this is to treat animal experimentation as lower-status research and have top-tier journals openly say they prefer less of it. The Trump administration's fuckery with the NIH is attempting to do this, but they are doing it by saying that they will fund less animal experimentation research via grants, which isn't how this sort of thing works. In theory, the research that takes place in a lab directly correlates to what is being funded by grants, in practice, it is much messier. Sometimes labs are awarded grants to fund future research, but that research has already been completed before the grant is given! The money is then used to fund future work. It is a federal crime to misallocate grant money, but all that means is that if grant money goes in, results must come out. The order isn't really specified. Journals, on the other hand, are a much more direct way to steer scientists in a better direction.

That's not to say that changing grant funding is a totally ineffective way to get fewer projects to involve animal experimentation. This is probably the only positive thing I will ever say about the Trump administration, but incentivizing via grants is a good starting point.

Conclusion

I don't really have any deep speculations as to why lab animals are treated so much better than farm animals. It could be because humans have always eaten meat, but science is comparatively new. It could be because we see meat eating as essential, while medical research is human hubris. I'm honestly not sure. But it is an interesting thing that I have noticed.