Animal research

September 1, 2006 12:29 PM

Animal research... I have tried to have an intelligent convo with my boyfriend about animal research. He's all for it and me, not so much. I understand open-heart surgery and and drug testing but I dont really like the behavioral stuff....

I read ALOT about it in high school 20-25 years ago and I remember being astounded by how much research was behavorial, etc. Not what I considered true medical research trying to save peoples lives. Maybe I was gravitting towards anti-animal-research publications?

Does anyone know percentages, etc?.
I have tried to searched for statistics but havent come up with solid numbers.

How many are tests for products, behavorial, and what I am calling medical (like drugs and surgery)?

I know there are probably valuable lessons we can learn by being really mean to monkeys--
But what ever they are trying to find out here : http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/video.asp?video=oregon&Player=wm&speed=_med I dont know if I really need to know.

posted by beccaj to Science & Nature (8 answers total)

Animal research and animal testing are always tough issues. However, if you're getting your source from PETA (who I think does do some excellent work), you're going to recieve highly biased and highly subjective information. (Worse than FoxNews... ).

Anyway, if you head on over to the Oregon National Primate Research Center's website, you'll see that pretty much all of what they are involved in is medical care and medical research. Here is a list of some of their discoveries over the past 40 years (of course they only list the ones that the lay-public will understand/recognize. I'm sure there are thousands more.) Most of their research seems to be based in the following areas: Nutrition, Aging, Maternal Substance Abuse, Depression, Reproductive Health, and AIDS. Many, if not all, of these problems have psychiatric symptoms and observing the behavior of primates is the only thing we can do to.

Of course the ONPRC is associated with the Oregon Health Sciences U, and that means that every experiment that they do on animals has to meet extremely strict standards to ensure that animals are NOT unreasonably harmed. Each institution has a committee, the IUAUC, which oversees all animal testing going on at a research institution. When I was working in a lab, every member had to be annual (or bi-annually) recertified to ensure they were up to current protocols.

Now, I'm not sure about animal testing for personal products and stuff -- but I'm sure that that occurs less and less frequently (at least in the US) because it's not as attractive to the consumer.

And to try and answer your question, nearly all behavioral studies done by educational institutions are done with a well defined purpose. You can often visit a specific lab's webpage and see why they are doing what they do. Often if animals are harmed (drugs/surgeries/toxins), the labs have a very clear application in mind as it pertains to humans (or pets, or livestock.) The harm that is done to an animal is always as little as possible, and frequently multiple types of information are gathered from one sacrifice so that animal deaths will be kept to a minimum. So basically: minimal harm to the animal, maximum benefit to humans.
posted by ruwan at 12:55 PM on September 1, 2006

I visited a lab that did behavioral (neuroscience) studies on monkeys recently. I'm a theorist by training but the professor I met with encouraged me to consider experiment. When I mentioned a general distaste for the nasty nature of that kind of work, he described in great detail what they do. He clearly took great pride in minimizing harm to the monkeys; bragging about how the electrodes that his lab used on the monkeys were smaller than the ones surgeons use on humans, and that they haven't lost a monkey yet (after 6 years). Since the monkeys were trained with juice treats, and experienced no pain during the testing, they were typically eager to start when it was time to run an experiment.

Of course, the realities of other labs may not be so nice, but I have noticed that attention to minimizing pain and suffering of test animals is pretty consistent among scientists. As the professor that I talked to pointed out, animals are expensive, have extensive legal protections, and take a long time to train. It is therefore foolish to use them when it isn't necessary, and also foolish to needlessly put them at risk. Plus, scientists are also emotional beings, and most have a natural aversion to inflicting suffering in innocent creatures.
posted by Humanzee at 1:07 PM on September 1, 2006 [1 favorite]

I find it delicious that someone named Humanzee answered this question.
posted by mmascolino at 1:29 PM on September 1, 2006

One thing I watched very recently was the Penn and Teller show on PETA, you can watch it on google video here - it's episode 14.

Without wanting to arouse a flamewar, I'd recommend watching it and coming to your own conclusion on PETA's practices. The Wikipedia entry on PETA is also quite insightful.
posted by rc55 at 2:03 PM on September 1, 2006

Well, in the interests of curtailing such a potential flame-war, it might be worth bearing in mind that PETA are entirely irrelevant this question (and furthermore, watching a Pen and Teller episode on practically anything is rarely going to provide you with anything useful about that subject).

Sorry I’ve nothing direct to add – although I’d be interested to find out some answer to the question myself.
posted by ed\26h at 2:28 PM on September 1, 2006

I have no stats on animal testing. But in case the discussion becomes "anyway, who cares?" check out the book When Elephants Weep. It is a pretty decent overview of emotions in animals. For so long, people have said, "animals don't have feelings, they're not like humans." But their emotions are surprisingly similar to ours (depending on what kind of animal). Frans De Waal's research on primates also shows that they feel pain when other primates feel pain, try to help, etc. The more I learned, the more animal suffering seems like human suffering.
posted by salvia at 2:45 PM on September 1, 2006

Anyway, if you head on over to the Oregon National Primate Research Center's website, you'll see that pretty much all of what they are involved in is medical care and medical research. Here is a list of some of their discoveries over the past 40 years (of course they only list the ones that the lay-public will understand/recognize.

Uhm, you think that the ONPRC is less biased than PETA? I've been to the ONPRC, I've seen the tiny cages and talked to the vivisectors. They're more zealously pro-vivisection than the ALF is zealously anti-vivisection. Probably because their entire business model depends on a steady supply of animals to kill. And no, they don't just focus on medical care and medical research; Judy Cameron, for example, certainly doesn't.
posted by cmonkey at 3:46 PM on September 1, 2006

While not exactly unbiased, you could start with the Animal Legal Defense Fund . They're fairly open about their stances without the Drama Queenery of PETA. (Sorry if the term offends anyone, I've always heard it used as a genderless term meaning "Someone who enjoys making scenes to get attention".)

I would think that they have resources that would help you find the information, or bulletin boards where you could ask outright. And bulletin boards usually draw people of the opposite mind, so you may well get direction to both sides of the fence. I would, however, avoid PETA like the plague if you're looking for cold, hard facts.
posted by Meep! Eek! at 4:11 PM on September 1, 2006