Posted by pseudoname on March 7, 2006, at 12:00:57
In reply to Re: animal lab terrorists convicted, posted by deirdrehbrt on March 5, 2006, at 20:38:00
Hey, Dee, I’m glad you commented on this.
I can give partial answers to some of your questions, based on personal experience and some reading:
> What assurance do we have that these animals do have a humane life?
• All of the U.S. labs fall under state regulations and inspectors.
• To get accreditation, university labs also have to have meet association standards and submit to inspections.
• I just read that the USDA also has inspectors for some labs, but I'm guessing they would mostly respond to complaints.
• U.S. universities also under federal law must have animal care & use committees, including people from outside the department, who are supposed to oversee living conditions and experiments.Researchers usually need their animals to be as unstressed as possible because otherwise they can throw off the experiment. The scientists I mentioned in the other thread a couple weeks ago are upset that people seem more upset by research animals than by animals raised for food. They consider this an indefensible double standard. They say living conditions for lab animals are *SO* much better than they are for the billions of animals grown & kept for food. Even the stresses in experimental conditions are dramatically less than the day-to-day (much less end-of-life) stresses for factory-farmed chickens, pigs, and cows.
Lab animals also generally have it better in many ways than wild animals. For example, the standard amount of food a lab animal gets is enough to maintain the animal at 80% of its free-feeding weight. Animals in the wild aren't likely to attain, much less maintain, such a weight. Animals in labs live longer, physically healthier lives than wild ones, free of virtually all typical wild terrors and afflictions.
> If, after expirementation, animals are still healthy, why are they destroyed? … Why can't they be used for other expirements?
At least in psychology experiments when drugs are not involved, animals often are re-used. But drug experiments usually (not always) need fresh animals that haven't been contaminated by previous drugs; otherwise, someone could always say the result of this experiment was really due to the PREVIOUS experiment's drugs.
> Couldn't some of them be adopted as are greyhounds?
I've seen on TV a few sanctuaries for long-lived (and very expensive) animals like primates. I knew a few people at university who adopted the rat they used in class (thus saving its life). But I think the sheer number (hundreds of thousands) of rats & cats & so on left over every year after experiments would make significant adoption impossible.
Someone could ask of course, “Why doesn't anyone adopt the BILLIONS of cows, chickens, and pigs that are raised in terrible conditions for food we absolutely don't need?” The scientists I mentioned in that other thread were very upset about this double standard.
I don't know if I've said anything worth reading, and these answers would not satisfy animal activists who believe NO live animals should ever be used in most experiments. I think it's pretty easy to argue that no animal lab experiments are “really necessary”, since humans survived for thousands of years without them.
poster:pseudoname
thread:616253
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060304/msgs/617023.html