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Animal Dissection: Cutting Kids’ Heartstrings
Just as people are not born Rolling Stones fans, bus drivers or wine aficionados, they don’t come into the world as animal experimenters. We don’t raise our hands in the first grade and profess that we want to be scientists who inject cancer into furry little mice, decapitate them with scissors and then cut out and examine their organs when we grow up. I’m pretty sure that if a 7-year-old said this in class, he or she would be sent to the school psychologist.
As children, we have a tremendous
affinity for animals. We learn the alphabet by reciting the names of
animals—“A” is for ant; “E” is for elephant. We love hearing
stories and watching TV shows about horses and dogs. We want to dress
like animals for Halloween. And we want to share our homes with them.
We see them not as resources to be exploited but as fellow living beings.
But our deep-seated fondness
for animals is eventually eroded. An indifference toward the plight
of animals gradually develops during years of socialization in a society
in which human interests—even trivial and frivolous ones—seem to
trump the most vital of animals’ interests. We’re taught that other
animals’ flesh is “food,” that animals’ hair and skin is
“clothing” and that watching wild animals who are confined to cages
qualifies as “entertainment.” As a result, most people don’t think
twice about destroying an animal’s life to fulfill some fleeting craving
for a “chicken sandwich” or taking their freedom, interrupting their
social bonds and endangering their health for an afternoon of “fun” at the
circus.
Yet despite our insensitivity to the most common forms of animal exploitation, there are still abuses that give us pause. Most people who read about experimenters who spend their days burning pigs with blowtorches, drilling holes into monkeys’ skulls, poisoning mice or paralyzing cats immediately think, “What kind of a person could do that?”
The answer, I suggest, is that any one of us could.
The view that it is acceptable to use animals as disposable laboratory tools is ingrained in us early on. As early as middle school, most students are forced by their teachers to cut up intact animals—usually earthworms, frogs or fetal pigs. Only 15 states have passed laws or resolutions that allow students to opt out of animal dissections. And even in states where these laws have been passed, students who choose not to dissect are sometimes ostracized or retaliated against by their peers and educators. A New Jersey student who opted out of dissection had the remains of a dead frog placed in her purse by her teacher and, in a teacher-initiated prank, was ordered to carry a dead animal across campus. Compassionate students are often shamed, and some feel pressured to violate their ethical principles.
Instructors commonly preface
dissection exercises by telling their impressionable students that animal
dissection is vital to a successful science education. Teachers
instruct their students that animals are killed for the
“greater good” and that the students should
“respect” the animals they are about to mutilate. This introduces
them to the idea that we are not morally culpable for harming animals
if it can benefit us in some way. And who are 12-year-olds to argue?
They don’t know about the terrible things that happen to animals when
they are procured for dissection or that there are abundant data documenting the superiority of
modern non-animal methods for teaching biology
(like interactive computer
programs and more
kinesthetic methods like clay
modeling).
The students are also likely unaware that non-animal replacements for
dissection are endorsed by organizations such as the National Science
Teachers Association
and that today at 95%
of medical schools future
physicians are being trained without the use of animals.
So, this indoctrination of students continues on down the line. The prevailing culture among those involved in science and medical education encourages students to deny responsibility for harming animals, to view animals in laboratories as qualitatively different from those who live outside of laboratories and to create emotional distance between themselves and the animals they harm.
So after this middle-school,
high-school, undergraduate and graduate-school indoctrination, it’s
no surprise that some students are so desensitized to the suffering
of animals and so invested in the idea of using animals as laboratory
tools that they choose to pursue animal
experimentation
as a career. We shouldn’t be shocked that these professional animal
experimenters, when challenged about the ethics of their enterprise,
claim that the animals who are killed in their laboratories are treated
with “respect,” even though any reasonable definition of
“respect” is incompatible with caging and killing animals in laboratories.
Animal dissection is not the benign classroom
exercise that many
believe it to be. It has profound implications for the
more than 10 million animals who are killed and dismembered -- and for
the hundreds of millions of animals who will continue to be brought
into this world to suffer in laboratories because we raise students
to view and treat them as scientific instruments.
Educators should be acutely aware that their role in students’ lives extends far beyond the classroom experience. If we don’t want children to become the kind of insensitive adults whose callousness toward animals shakes us to our very core, then we must teach them that the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” should apply to all the Earth’s inhabitants—including those who are smaller, furrier and slimier than we are.
For more information on this topic and resources for educators, visit www.peta.org/dissection- Posted in
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30 Comments so far
Show AllI enjoyed this article (NOT). It brought back all the memories of how during "biology lab" we made cruel jokes about the already dead animals we were sectioning and "identifying" organs from.
It is a crock that is designed to further desensitization of young people. The development of compassion is needed in place of it. How many students cannot learn music, shop skills, and art but still are taught to take a knife to a dead animal and label the organs?
I made it through eleven and a half years of school and never heard of cutting animals up just to see what was inside. I grew up on a farm, and we raised chickens, rabbits, beef, and hogs for food, and from an early age I watched the process as my parents butchered these animals and cut them up for the table, and there were the fish and deer that supplimented our diet. I still have a biology project I did in about eighth grade, which was actually a test. It's of my own drawings depicting the human body, showing every bone in the body, in the space it belonged in, although disconnected, and every organ as well. I didn't have a human body to work from. All I had was what I learned from the pictures shown and what the teacher said about what each part was and where it went.
Of course that was fifty years or so ago, and things are taught differently now. I realize they don't have the time we had to spend on teaching kids any more, and it's obvious the kids don't remember the little they do get from their classes now, even with the experience of cutting up little animals to see what's inside them.
I graduated from college late in life. In biology class we refused to do the mass pithing of live frogs. We told the teacher that her demonstration on one frog sufficed to show us what it did and also what a horrible way it is to make a point.
On the other hand, the dissection of an enbalmed fetal pig was different. I never could have imagined the intricacy and beauty of the interior of an animal. Since the pig was already dead, it did not seem so bad, although I did mourn a little.
I hope that people are encouraged to think about the moral choices when eating or using animals in any way. We may end up coming to different conclusions, but we should examine our actions and not be on automatic like a snake when it is choking and eating a rodent. The snake has no choice. That's the way it is. We have choices.
Joe
Have you ever seen the movie 'A Boy and His Dog' starring a young Don Johnson, of Miami Vice fame? It has an interesting moral about the choices we make. I highly recommend it.
The DOD is the biggest offender in animal vivisection. Maiming, burning, poisoning, chemical exposure, radiation, biological weapons testing, medical experiments, and all the horrors of our MIC are brought down on helpless innocent animals. It's chilling. Corporate profits once again trump compassion and reason.
The same experiments and tests are repeated ad nauseum for years on end, despite the failures of so many conclusions when humans become the subjects. Animal experimentation is a failure. But it's hugely profitable for animal breeding facilities specializing in the breeding of beagles, mice, rabbits, and primates. It's also an engine for NHIS grant money for some of our mad scientists crawling around our universities.
Not surprising that American society grows more barbaric and sociopathic with each passing day. There's something seriously sick about a teacher mocking compassionate kids. Meanwhile, all the little Frakenstein's will graduate with honors.
I'm glad some people are cognizant of the horrors of animal experimentation going on for over one hundred years. If people actually saw what these animals are forced to endure before being killed, only the hardest of hearts would feel it's all been necessary to benefit mankind.
Animal dissection, doesn't just happen in American schools, nor the American system. Animal experimentation is a global problem.
Nor is it simply a matter of Evil Corporations.
As the article points out,
"The prevailing culture among those involved in science and medical education encourages students to deny responsibility for harming animals, to view animals in laboratories as qualitatively different from those who live outside of laboratories and to create emotional distance between themselves and the animals they harm. "
There are too many scientists, too many technocrats, all over the world, who are vehemently in favour of animal experimentation. And too often, these scientists are allowed to spout their spiels in favour of any and all animal experimentation, without being challenged, without being forced to defend their desire to engage in animal experimentation, on scientific and ethical terms. Even in cases / experiments where there is absolutely no reason to conduct the experiment, other than deliberate torture of animals.
So right. It is done all over the world.
But demeaning young kids who have the right to obstain from animal dissection is an American problem. Sadists "R" Us.
I didn't really enjoy the article, mostly because I think that dissection is a valuable learning tool, but also because I think the animal rights movement is stupid. Future doctors need to start somewhere-cutting straight into cadavers is too advanced for a college freshman.
Also, I think that the media plays a much larger role in the desensitizing of young people than cutting open a frog and labeling its parts.
The writer of this article lost credibility with me when he suggested that animals aren't naturally used as food and clothing. Try telling that to the Native Americans who needed those things to survive. Maybe we should get mad at a wolf that eats a deer, too. Before focusing on animal rights, I think that we should focus on ending human rights abuses. Call me a speciesist.
I agree that media are involved in desensitizing young people (and everyone else). But, the devaluing of life is the process worthless high school vivisection achieves. Humans often devalue the lives of animals in order to help us devalue the lives of other humans.
I am not a vegetarian. I wear leather. And I fish for a hobby. But, I try to practice thanksgiving and respect for the lives of the animals I come in contact with.
"Humans often devalue the lives of animals in order to help us devalue the lives of other humans"
Well said!
Thank you NG, I agree.
Without the warmth of fur, the native peoples of the arctic could not have flourished. Leather shoes last longer than plastic. Which is more "natural"?
I wish half the energy (and money) that PETA people put into caring about animals could be put toward ending needless HUMAN deaths.
You live in conditions that require you to wear fur? A leather jacket?
I do agree that leather shoes, properly made, and properly maintained, are the best shoes available.
It would also help if they got their facts right. What I see of P.E.T.A. in Australia is all too often armchair activists with no idea. Get real world experience and see what you propose in that light. 1500 farming families loose their livelyhood to save an animal? I think something is wrong with your thinking.
Pete
"The writer of this article lost credibility with me when he suggested that animals aren't naturally used as food and clothing. Try telling that to the Native Americans who needed those things to survive. Maybe we should get mad at a wolf that eats a deer, too."
So, in contemporary modern society, people eat burgers, steaks etc, because they need those things to survive? What if stuffing their faces with lots of burgers leads to cardiac disease? Ah I see, the cardiac disease eliminates those who do so, thus allowing the rest of who do not stuff their faces with burgers to survive.
In contemporary society, people wear fur coats, fur trim on their clothing, to the theater, to the opera, because they need fur coats to ensure their survival from the air condition?
Perhaps you might enlighten me on how a leather jacket worn out on a night on the town, is necessary for survival?
"I didn't really enjoy the article, mostly because I think that dissection is a valuable learning tool, but also because I think the animal rights movement is stupid. Future doctors need to start somewhere-cutting straight into cadavers is too advanced for a college freshman."
And what about high school students? Including those who do NOT want to engage in animal dissection?
Also, why is a human cadaver too advanced for a future freshman? Why is it necessary for a future doctor, who isn't a surgeon, who treats humans, to dissect animals?
Too bad NormGoldman and Penelope missed the point and prefer to remain in the Dark Ages. Alternative computer models are avaialable and haven proven to be more reliable than animal subjects. In fact, some of our best medical schools no longer keep live animal labs for medical students. Keeping live animals is more costly, too. Just like everything else in this country, money trumps compassion and logic. Campaign donations keep the indsutry flourishing.
Not everyone is destined to be a doctor so dissection is not necessary for all students, epecially the ones who choose not to participate. Since some states allow students refusal by law, it should be honoered rather than terrorizing them with dead animals in their school bags.
Going off about Native American's 200 years ago for using animals for food and clothing is a bullshit point. Native Americans didn't exploit or torture animals. Their goals were survival based, not profit based on cruelty. If our society had 1/100th of the respect for animals that Native Americans had we'd be doing good.
The idea is to raise awareness of desensitizing our kids to the pain and suffering of living things. All the better to perpetuate our militaristic mindset for the Pentagon's plan of our path for fifty years of war.
"Before focusing on animal rights, I think that we should focus on ending human rights abuses."
Human rights abuses will end when we become more compassionate about the way we treat animals. Everyone should make the effort and take the time to learn about what takes place on factory farms in America.
I agree with you that the media plays a large role in desensitizing everyone. Another thing, we do not need meat in our diets. In fact vegetarians, that also take vitamin suppliments, are healthier than meat eaters.
Look around at the fat a**es that are killing themselves with saturated fats in their diets.
I am a healthy lacto-ovo vegetarian and, at 72, my weight is what it was when I graduated from high school.
In a species that can relegate a segment of its own to the status of being only a step above the animal species, as was done to the slaves and their descendants, into the fifties, how can it be expected to have any reverence for animals only half a century later? In my estimation, a segment of our species hasn't just devolved, it's branched off into another species that as yet has no name.
I'm very happy to learn that alternatives to animal-tormenting research are in place and growing.
Many years ago, as a young, divorced mom, I worked in a University lab using organs from dead rats in research. The killing method was to swing the rat by its tail, bashing it against a stone sink, then quickly slitting its throat with scissors and letting the blood drain into the sink. I simply could not do this, so the 'boss' agreed to do it for me, after which I would proceed with dissection and experimental protocols. In labs around me medical students were sticking electric probes into the brains of live cats, livers were being extracted from rabbits and what else was going on I did not want to know. I remember the deliberate effort it took to numb myself to the plight of the animals, which was initially horrifying, because -that perennial excuse - I needed the job. Nor did I describe to my children what I was doing.
Perhaps my uneasy conscience was quieted somewhat by a small act of 'redemption'. After persuading one researcher to give me his (uninjected) rabbit carcasses, which would otherwise have gone into the trash bin. I quickly skinned and dressed them out, and took them home to feed my family. That these few fat lab bunnies, at least, were not totally 'wasted' was the rationale I chose for continuing.
After five years of this, I moved to other work and never went back. I'm not proud of my part in these experiments, but was immersed then in a culture which gave the animals little thought.
Excellent article. It presents realistic and effective alternatives to dissection that are endorsed by mainstream educational organizations thereby making it quite clear that this is a problem that could be easily solved given the political will to do so. Replacing dissection and saving animal lives is not something that requires further technological innovation or that would compromise our educational objectives; rather the solutions already exist and simply need to be implemented.
A second virtue of this article is that the author resists the temptation to dismiss those who mutilate and kill animals as moral monsters that defy understanding. Since the solution to this problem is not a technological one, the process of socialization into how such harmful behavior comes to seem normal or acceptable is important to understand.
Moral progress has always taken the form of expanding the sphere of moral concern to include individuals who formerly were not included; whose lives and interests were not deemed to be very important. When society realizes that animal lives matter and that their interests cannot be casually ignored, the problem of dissection will be easily remedied...the solution is already sitting on the shelf waiting to be implemented.
I did not read the entire article because I'm a wuss and it would have upset me.
All I have to say is this: All life is sacred, our earth is sacred. And that should be the starting point as we contemplate how we as human beings will conduct ourselves.
Unfortunate, but I wouldn't want a doctor operating on me that hasn't done it before.
Just as important in preventing animal cruelty, this country must get a handle on the huge amount of pet breeding that goes on, too often in abusive "puppy mills," and also too often resulting in pets that are left to spend their last days in animal shelters.
Let me tell you about learning Medicine in my University (in México). 25 of 30 Surgical practice's teachers mandate students to do several practices in stray dogs. These are invasive and unnecesary. By example, they do not sterilize dogs; they open the abdomen, pull out the intestines, put them back in place, close them and take care for the next surgery in the same animal.
The students have to keep the dogs in their homes --where the animal is not welcome-- for several months in order to present him alive and have their grade. Every year we hear horrific stories about abandon animals, cruelty, animal suffering and distress for the students and their families (about 250 families per year). The advocates of this practice says that the students need to put their hands in real blood and pain. The students in this class do not protest openly. They follow orders.
The other 5 teachers disagree with this procedure. They introduce students into a real human surgery. Here, students says they are as good or better as the others who have practices on dogs. As far I know, they do not have animal cruelty concerns. One of these students told me: "proffesor says that we are nor mere veterinarians to do so".
Regards,
Ana Cristina
Hey I am a Member Of P.E.T.A. People Eating Tasty Animals!
Great article. The supposed competition between compassion for animals and humans is specious. One does not deny the other. And the converse is true. Studies have shown that animal abusers tend to abuse humans as well.
Computer models and modelling clay are nice, but all of the fancy techniques that will ever be invented cannot take the place of good teaching that embraces all aspects of a learning experience. Dissection in high schools and vivisection in college offer powerful opportunities for teachers and mentors to share their respect for living things, and to guide students to a new understanding about the nature of life and death. How great is the shame when that opportunity is destroyed by callousness among students and teachers!
Any research institution using live animals in the US today is required to have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. The IACUC approves and monitors all live animal research projects, following very specific state and federal rules that ban procedures such as stunning rats by slamming their heads on ceramic sinks and taking meat home from research labs. These are conscientious people who care enough to do the hard work of maintaining safe and humane conditions for laboratory animals. They do their part to contribute to our understanding of life, and to bring us health and safety. People who accuse them of being insensitive, emotionally distant or unethical strike me as willfully ignorant and ruled by emotion or peer pressure.
Why do you need to dissect, and worse, VIVISECT, an animal to teach respect for living things? VIVECTION. How exactly does cutting a living animal, teach respect for living things? You are aren't quickly killing the animal for food or it's skin. You are cutting a living animal, which you are deliberately keeping alive while you are cutting it. To learn respect for living things. Should humans also engage in torture of other humans, to teach respect for human life?
"Any research institution using live animals in the US today is required to have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. The IACUC approves and monitors all live animal research projects, following very specific state and federal rules that ban procedures such as stunning rats by slamming their heads on ceramic sinks and taking meat home from research labs. These are conscientious people who care enough to do the hard work of maintaining safe and humane conditions for laboratory animals. They do their part to contribute to our understanding of life, and to bring us health and safety. People who accuse them of being insensitive, emotionally distant or unethical strike me as willfully ignorant and ruled by emotion or peer pressure."
And yet, if you regularly read the research literature in various fields where animal experimentation is common, you will easily find examples of studies where the animals were force fed EXTREMELY large amounts of particular substances. Amounts that no human could consume. Amounts that are well acknowledged as dangerous, nay fatal. Not surprisingly those animals always develope various fatal diseases.
What do experiments such as those prove? Why are they approved and conducted by the humane and conscientious people?
"How exactly does cutting a living animal teach respect for living things?"
In a biology course I took in college we had one lab that involved vivisection; that day we did a series of electrophysiological "experiments" using thigh muscles that a lab assistant had very recently harvested from live frogs. We were not encouraged to discuss or write about our feelings and how the experience changed us. I do not recall being given any information about where the animals came from, how they were treated, or the safeguards that kept them healthy and isolated from native species. I doubt we were given much of that information. I remember that I found the project to be a little bit offensive. I think maybe one of my classmates kidded me in a good-natured way about my being a vegetarian. I would have been at least as interested in the social swirl around the project as I was in the lab itself.
We all knew our frog leg lab would not make a new contribution to biology, but in a very direct and practical way we saw how intensely physical a living thing is. And we saw the potential to apply physics to biological problems, and to apply the scientific method to a problem in vertebrate biology. I felt honored to be allowed to join in the line of scientists from Galvani to Duchenne and onward to the electrophysiologists of our day.
I avoided other courses with live animal labs. My friends who worked in research labs with protocols that included vivisection applied the skills we learned from the frog muscle lab to do real research in projects that were designed, funded and conducted because they had potential to ease suffering of people or animals, cure disease or make significant advances in the science of physiology. Maybe to you having an understanding of physiology--which can only be learned from living things--does not engender respect for life. To me it does. Acquiring that knowledge through original experimentation is a profoundly humbling experience. It is like the difference between reading "Four score and seven years ago . . ." and actually going to Gettysburg.
"What do experiments such as those prove? Why are they approved and conducted by the humane and conscientious people?"
Actually, the value of a research project is a minor concern of an IACUC. That de-emphasis is appropriate because abusing, mistreating, neglecting or needlessly endangering animals is wrong regardless of how much benefit could be gained from the project. The worth of projects is evaluated in other ways; these days, potential benefit is mainly filtered by a very competitive funding process. One common reason research animals are given fatal diseases is to evaluate the safety and efficacy of experimental treatments. If you want to know if a cancer drug works in mice, you have to test it on mice with cancer. The IACUC looks at the "humane end point" section of the protocol very carefully to verify that an approved euthanization technique will be used to kill the animals before they show evidence of suffering if possible, or before they suffer greatly, if suffering is necessary. A protocol must be revised if it includes avoidable suffering; it must be rejected if it has too much unavoidable suffering.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to answer your questions as best I can.
Hi DJE,
Please see my post above on the documented failure of IACUCs to carry out their legal mandate to monitor the use of animals in laboratory settings. As you know, the Animal Welfare Act explicitly exempts consideration of mice of the genus Mus, rats of the genus Rattus, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and agricultural animals used in agricultural experimentation. While experimenters who receive federal grants (i.e., taxpayer dollars) to carry out their "work" must adhere to the guidelines specified in the Guide to the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals in their use of vertebrate animals, these are only guidelines and there is no legal mandate that holds the experimenters to this requirement. The history of animal welfare regulations and guidelines in the U.S. has highlighted great reluctance on the part of experimenters to do anything beyond that which is absolutely required (and audits, inspection reports, and violations reports have shown that very often, experimenters have failed to even reach that very low bar).
It is, therefore, not surprising that studies from 2005 & 2009 on the use of analgesic pain relief for rats and mice following experimental surgeries that cause extreme pain (such as craniotomies, laparotomies, thoracotomies, etc.) indicate that 50 to 80 percent of these animals do not receive analgesic pain relief. You may wish to look up the work of Paul Flecknell, Claire Richardson, David Morton (animal welfare scientists who have published extensively on the failure of experimenters to ensure adequate welfare -- even within the flawed paradigm that suggests that our might that allows us to cage animals & visit upon them every cruelty imagined by humans makes our actions right); review laboratory inspection reports (some are available on the USDA's website); and take a look at video footage shot inside laboratories by undercover investigators with PETA & HSUS before so quickly dismissing the concerns of the animal protectionists.
It is clear that this excellent piece, which thoughtfully challenges the status quo on our use of animals in classroom settings - and, indeed, our use (and abuse) of animals generally - has ruffled more than a few feathers (no pun intended). I'm particularly concerned that some posters have chosen to trot out the tired old lines claiming stringent regulations and massive oversight.
In fact, there is only one law in the U.S.—the Animal Welfare Act (AWA)—that governs treatment of animals in laboratories (for experimentation, testing & teaching). According to multiple federal audits, even this law, which deals mainly with caging and husbandry issues, is not being adequately enforced. Worse, the animals’ last line of defense—oversight committees at laboratories (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees or IACUCs—are failing at their jobs as well.
The creation of IACUCs was Congress’ response to massive public outcry over abuse and neglect in laboratories exposed by PETA in the early ’80s. In 1985, Congress amended the AWA to require that every animal facility set up a committee to be responsible for ensuring that experimenters search for alternatives to the use of animals and consider alternatives to painful procedures; that discomfort, distress and pain to animals are avoided or minimized; and that experiments are not being unnecessarily duplicated. In essence, IACUCs must ensure that the “3 R’s” of animal experimentation—reduction of numbers of animals used, refinement of procedures to minimize or avoid pain, and replacement of animals with non-animal models—have been considered.
Animals in laboratories endure lives of deprivation, isolation, stress, trauma and depression even before they are used in any experiment. Implementing the 3 R’s is a minimal provision extended to animals, and IACUCs are legally mandated to ensure that this modicum of humane treatment is applied. But 50 years after the 3 R’s were first articulated in 1959 and 23 years after the implementation of IACUCs, animal experimenters and IACUCs are still failing to take the 3 R’s seriously. Consequently, countless animals have been subjected to unnecessary suffering.
In September 2005, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published a scathing audit report describing a climate in which laboratories view fines for AWA violations as a “cost of conducting business.” The report notes that at almost one-third of facilities, IACUCs failed to ensure that experimenters considered alternatives to painful procedures. The report cites this failure on the part of IACUCs as being the most frequent AWA violation. The report further documents the failure of IACUCs to ensure that animals receive adequate veterinary care and to ensure that unnecessary or repetitive experiments are not performed on animals.
Inspection reports filed by USDA veterinarians and evidence gathered by PETA through whistleblowers and undercover investigations corroborate these concerns. At Columbia University, the IACUC’s failure to adequately review animal experimentation protocols meant that monkeys and dogs in scientifically questionable studies died slowly in their cages without veterinary care.
At Ohio State University, the failure of the IACUC to question the necessity of using dogs to test the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids means that dogs are forced to run on treadmills until they collapse. They are killed and dissected—even though the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids for humans are already well documented.
At the University of Connecticut, the University of California at San Francisco, the University of Washington and dozens of other universities, experimenters implant coils in monkeys’ eyes and put metal cylinders into holes drilled into the monkeys’ skulls to determine which parts of the brain control eye movement—even though non-invasive techniques can be used on people to obtain human-relevant data.
Each time an IACUC allows a painful procedure when a less painful alternative is available or allows a redundant or useless experiment to proceed, it is not merely an administrative failure but a violation of federal law. Most importantly, these failings mean that animals suffer. There is no excuse for this.
Members of IACUCs should be carefully selected and properly trained to understand their responsibilities under the law and to understand all facets of the 3 R’s. If they don’t perform their responsibilities as they are mandated, they should be held accountable by government agencies and compliance officers at their universities and removed from their positions. Laziness and ignorance have been tolerated for far too long.