Research with animals
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006I'd like to take a moment to consider a recent comment on a fairly old post about a class meeting wherein my students and I considered some of the inconsistent views about animals with which people seem to walk around. Here's what the commenter said:
"But, as one of my students put it, 'Some of these people who want to shut down the animal research facilities should put a sock in it while they're still eating meat.'"
This suggests that your classroom discussion created a false impression in your students, perhaps due to your own false assumptions.
I've campaigned for ten years to end harmful…
jstemwedel | September 4, 2006I am, as usual, late to the party reacting to the news that UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach has given up research on primates owing to "pressure put on him, his neighborhood, and his family by the UCLA Primate Freedom Project". As reported by Inside Higher Ed:
Ringach's name and home phone number are posted on the Primate Freedom Project's Web site, and colleagues and UCLA officials said that Ringach was harassed by phone -- his office phone number is no longer active -- and e-mail, as well as through demonstrations in front of his home.
In an e-mail this month to several anti-animal…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2006Younger offspring did not, to my knowledge, watch of listen to the State of the Union address wherein President Bush called for legislation prohibiting the creation of human-animal hybrids. Indeed, it's not even clear that this wee beastie has any human DNA in it. (With recessive traits, it can be hard to tell.) Yet it's hard not to think this specimen is treading on ethically dangerous ground:
Younger offspring's explanation of this image, plus an image from Elder offspring that calls out for your interpretation, below the fold.
According to younger offspring:
It's part cow and part…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2006This post, originally posted 8 January 2006 on the old site, responds to an email I got after the last post. Given John's recent post on Pro-Test, the questions are still timely.
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I received an email from a reader in response to my last post on PETA's exposing of problems with the treatment of research animals at UNC. The reader pointed me to the website of an organization concerned with the treatment of lab animals in the Research Triangle, www.serat-nc.org. And, she wrote the following:
Some people may think that PETA is extreme. However, the true "extreme" is what happens to…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2006Wrestling overgrown rose bushes out of the ground may be harder than wrestling gators. (At the very least, it seems to take longer, while provoking less sympathy).
Anyway, while I'm recovering from that, here's a "classic" post from the old location. It was originally posted 5 January 2006, but the ethical issues are still fresh.
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Since I'm in the blessed wee period between semesters, it's time to revisit some "old news" (i.e., stuff that I had to set aside in the end-of-semester crush). Today, a story from about a month ago, wherein the Rick Weiss of the Washington Post reports…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2006The continuing saga of the uninvited nest seems to have come to an end. The hatchlings have died.
It's not entirely clear why they perished, althought there is no doubt that they perished -- the nest is crawling with ants.
Possibly the noise of the work being done in the yard kept the mother bird away from the nest too long. Possibly the blazing hot, full-on summer weather made the newborn chicks more vulnerable (e.g., to dehydration). My better half opines that mama bird appeared very young herself; is it possible she was not yet capable of providing the necessary care for a nest of…
jstemwedel | May 9, 2006The choice in question was whether to try to relocate a nest full of eggs in a tree whose number is almost up. With your help, we decided against relocation. Moreover, we're ready to delay removal of the tree as long as might be necessay until the nest is vacant.
Today's developments documented below the fold.
Keep in mind that these pictures were taken from higher on the ladder than one is officially supposed to stand, with the needles of the tree digging into my flesh as I held the branches back to get a good shot. (Also, raising hives; my pine allergy strikes again.) So yeah, I know…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2006Yesterday I asked for advice about how to deal with a nest of eggs that presents itself in an inopportune place (a tree slated to meet a gruesome end in a whisper-chipper) at an inopportune time (mere days ahead of when we finally launch our backyard overhaul). The consensus among commenters who professed knowledge of or experience with birds in the wild seems to be that there is no promising way to relocate the nest without scaring the mama bird away and leaving the eggs cold and orphaned. Given that the whole point of moving the nest would be not to throw out the baby birds with the…
jstemwedel | April 29, 2006I need to call on the collective wisdom of the internets to address an issue in my back yard.
We have this tree in our back yard. It's a pretty awful tree. It was probably a living Christmas tree that the people who lived here before us planted, but it's in a really bad location (from the point of view of being able to use the rest of the yard sensibly), and it's ugly, and it's also sharp and pointy.
We want it gone. Indeed, finally, after about a year of planning, we are ready to have it removed (replaced with a Fuyu persimmon tree, in a slightly different location) as part of a major…
jstemwedel | March 22, 2006In comments to a pair of posts about research with animals, some issues that are germane to the subject of research with human subjects have come up. In particular, they raise the question of whether scientists ought to use results from ethically flawed experiments. And, this question pushes the question of the extent to which ethically flawed research can still be scientifically sound.
Here, I want to dig into the first question, but I'll only make a first pass at the second.
First, here are the comments that precipitated this post.
On my first post on the lab group lock-out from the…
jstemwedel | March 18, 2006This week my students (the ones who you already know are so smart) and I talked in class about the ethics of research with animals. One thing that came up in these discussions is the likelihood that a lot of people hold internally inconsistent views when it comes to how we ought to treat animals.
It's true that there are folks who try hard to be completely consistent: they're not only against animal experimentation, but they don't eat animal flesh, or eggs, or milk, or honey, don't wear leather, don't kill the ants that have taken up in their kitchen, etc. Or, on the other end of the…
jstemwedel | March 16, 2006My post a couple days ago about Laurentian University's lock-out of researchers from their animal care facility sparked some heated discussion in the comments. Also, it sparked an email from someone close enough to the situation to give me an update on the situations since December. The issue of how, ethically, to use animals in research, and of how the interests of animals and the interests of students should be balanced, seems to have touched a nerve. So, we're going back in.
First, here's the update, with thanks to my email correspondent:
End of December: they approved our protocols and…
jstemwedel | March 14, 2006Catching up on some news from Canada (yes, I'm really far behind on Canadian current events!):
At the end of last year, the administration at Laurentian University changed the locks to the research facility housing the animals used in research in the behavioural neuroscience program. The lock-out of researchers was initiated by the university's Animal Control Committee (ACC) after that committee rejected all of the animal use protocols of one of the faculty members in the behavioural neuroscience program.
Apparently, the ACC judged the problems with the protocols siognificant enough to…