From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,talk.politics.animals,
	uk.politics.animals,alt.animals.rights.promotion,sci.med
Subject: Re: Lab Experiments 'Terrifying' For Animals
Date: 23 Jan 2005 21:06:22 -0800
Message-ID: <1106543182.869669.97550@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>

>>On the other hand, Rich acknowledged, the journal that published the
paper is reputable. She said more scientists will have to assess it,
especially as it seems to contain some strange conclusions. "One person
said to me, 'if handling animals causes tumors, what does this say about
our pets?'"

Balcombe dismissed that objection. he said.
Lab animals learn to expect bad things, and their fear of handling
stems from that, he added; this isn't the case with pets.<<



COMMENT:

We're hearing a certain amount of fuzzy thinking and B.S. from both
sides here. There's truth here, but it's somewhere in the middle.  As a
physician and biomedical researcher who's published scientific work
using both rodent and dog models, let me put my two cents in.

First of all, Balcombe's objection is disingenuous because he's talking
about rodents, which may be the only lab animals he thinks about. "The
difference between my
pet rats and a rat in a laboratory is my pet rats don't ever get stuck
with needles, have blood drawn or get force-fed a drug," Yeah, that may
be true, but what about Balcombe's pet cats and dogs?  How does he get
his cats tested for FeLV and FIV if they don't get poked with needles
to draw blood? How do his animals get vaccinated? Does he not neuter or
spay his pets?  How does that go?

The truth is that any pet animal which has had many invasive procedures
at a vet will exhibit the very same stress responses as we're talking
about, as soon as it gets a whiff of the office smell on the 3rd or 4th
or 10th visit. If you own a pet, you've seen that. All the issues
brought up with animal research also occur in veterinary practice, and
in human practice too, particularly in pediatric oncology and
anesthesia. There are ways to deal with all of them.

One of the ways is simple desensitization, or exposure therapy. To do
this, you simply do a lot of handling of the animals in situations
where they're not hurt. At my institution the dogs (which are all bred
in-house) are only semi-socialized, but they're exposed to humans every
day when they're sent to the exercise yard, and even more intimately
when they are brought into the clinical space for monthly health exams
and checkups. All this makes them quite handle-able.

The second way you can deal with anxiety in animals is pre-medicate it
away.  All dogs at my institution get acepromazine before being taken
out of their housing for invasive procedures, and after that, more
tranquilizers in scaled fashion (ketamine/valium, or even if necessary
propofol/gas full anesthesia) when they need it. And also pre and post
procedure narcotics for pain. The result of all of this is that these
animals are no more anxious after many minor invasive procedures than
they are before the first one. Apparently, they have no memory, as your
pets do of the vet's office. As illustration, we work with 60 lb
animals with all their teeth, but never use muzzles, nor ever need to.

Rodents are at risk to be mistreated. One of the difficulties is their
size-- they are so easy to control by hand using neck/back scruff
techniques, that often they can be handled without fear of bite, even
without medication. Researchers therefore often omit the medication.
This is probably not a good thing, and from the humanitarian point of
view there's just as much justification for premedicating rats and mice
for major invasive procedures (ie those that are more invasive than the
premedication shot), as there is for cats or dogs. A similar thing
happens with husbandry and routine human contact. Rats and mice don't
need to be exercised in separate facilities, so they usually aren't.
That leaves them to be left alone entirely. Nor are they often handled
by hand except when being invaded. This also is a mistake. As anybody
who has owned a pet rat or mouse can tell you, rodents also can be
semi-socialized with a little bit of handling and human contact.

The rodent stress problem is partly just bad luck for rodents due to
their small size, easy care, relative lack of "cuteness," easy
controllability, and cheapness. Some of the blame for the mistreatment
of rodents rests on researchers, who can be lazy, and may well not have
the empathic connection for rodents that they naturally do for more
common companion animals like dogs and cats. But the rest of the story
is that some of the blame for the mistreatment of rodents rests on PETA
and the animal rights activists, who have managed to get federal law to
place non rodent mammal research under a set of very onerous and
expensive USDA restrictions which are far worse than apply to the food
industry, or to pet owners. With the result that most non-rodent
research has disappeared, because it's been priced out of the market
due to the artificial PETA-generated expenses. In turn, loss of large
animal experience with its necessity for premedication and
desensitization-handing that it brings as a habit, has given us more
generations of researchers who simply don't have those habits. When
these researchers get hold of rodents, they tend to mistreat them
because they don't know any other way.

Putting it in other words, research which runs on only rodent
experience is bound to run into problems if inadequate prevention of
suffering and stress.  Large animals teach stress management by
experience and direct observation. Panicked and stressed dogs put their
tails between their legs, urinate, and make piteous facial expressions.
Cats in similar situations yowl and hiss. Pigs may squeal almost
ultrasonically, and at astonishing intensity. Cats, dogs, and pigs all
can produce vicious bites. Rabbits may simply collapse and die. All
these things provoke automatic responses in researchers to see that
stress and fear are reduced. But the researcher who, unlike the
veterinarian, has no set of reflexes for dealing with a wide spectrum
of animal handling, and who thinks of rodents as wild squirmy animals
which are naturally panicked anyway, is less likely to do anything
about it. In fact, a certain amount of "rodent-bigotry" is one reason
why rodent-research has so far successfully resisted being put under
USDA control (of course there are also other reasons involving
logistics).

The large scale research move to "rodents-only" has not only been bad
for rodents, but bad for science.  One of the problems is that stress
in mishandled rodents may indeed result in scattered and poor data,
particularly in research which involves the immune system (the hormone
corticosterone, generated in large amounts in rodents during stress, is
immunosuppressive in a similar way to cortisol in humans).  This can be
avoided with proper handling (as some of my own research in mice
demonstrates). But a far worse problem is that the loss of non-rodent
animal models in science has meant the loss of a large number of models
which are far more appropriate to human problems than anything possible
in rodents. To pick two examples: there is a growing amount of blood
lipid and diet "research" in rats, even though rats are extremely
resistant to atherosclerosis. This research is more and more replacing
the older research in a more appropriate rabbit model, largely because
rabbits are now under USDA inspection control, and as a result have
become very expensive to house and use in research (far more expensive
than housing rabbits bred for food!). In a field I'm familiar with,
liquid ventilation research, a great deal of time and money has been
wasted using rats, which model humans very poorly due to far faster
metabolisms and CO2 productions, and tiny lungs which behave very
differently from those of man.  By contrast, the larger breed
corsairial canine, which is a far better model for human lung research,
has nearly been banished from the field. (But try doing a stethoscope
exam on a *rat* with chemical asthma.)

I don't have much hope for the future. We need animals for research,
but the "animal advocates," who have long argued that animals are poor
models for humans, have succeeded in getting ridiculously expensive
laws passed which have destroyed many animal research models, and thus
made their own arguments partially self-fulfilling. (I wonder if that
wasn't their real purpose). True enough, large animals are now better
protected from mistreatment by researchers than in the past---- but the
huge overkill and hypocrisy in these laws (which, as again as noted,
apply to research animal housing, for example, but not food-animal
housing) has made large animal research rare. Therefore, what social
good did it do to protect large animals in research, if that made the
research too expensive to do at all? The point was supposedly actually
to do some research, not just outlaw it by the back door. The win-win
situation that makes for good politics didn't happen in this field. As
a result, trust has disappeared and science has now drawn the line at
extending similar laws to rodent husbandry and handling.  And now the
huge irony: because of the intrinsic vulnerability of rodents to abuse
by researchers, probably rodents need the oversight of at least
veterinary pain and stress management more than any other research
species, and they always have. And yet, as of now, due to the animal
research wars, rodents are probably farther away from getting it than
they ever have been. Go figure.

SBH

From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@KeithLynch.net>
Newsgroups: alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,talk.politics.animals,
	uk.politics.animals,alt.animals.rights.promotion,sci.med
Subject: Re: Lab Experiments 'Terrifying' For Animals
Date: 24 Jan 2005 21:04:53 -0500
Message-ID: <ct49g5$qtp$1@panix1.panix.com>

Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> ... PETA and the animal rights activists, who have managed to get
> federal law to place non rodent mammal research under a set of very
> onerous and expensive USDA restrictions ...

> But a far worse problem is that the loss of non-rodent animal models
> in science has meant the loss of a large number of models which are far
> more appropriate to human problems than anything possible in rodents.

Modest proposal:  Use spammers.  They may be slightly more similar in
some ways to human beings than rodents are.  And neither the USDA nor
PETA nor anyone else has the slightest empathy for them.

I could be mistaken about the former.  While spammers look vaguely
human, there is evidence that they're more akin to a sort of
especially vile cockroach than to anything in the mammalian lineage.

The big difficulty is getting researchers to not stress or mishandle
them.  Maybe only use researchers who have never had an email address?
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,talk.politics.animals,
	uk.politics.animals,alt.animals.rights.promotion,sci.med
Subject: Re: Lab Experiments 'Terrifying' For Animals
Date: 24 Jan 2005 19:50:40 -0800
Message-ID: <1106625040.223431.90850@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>

The idea has merit. Spammers as subjects for the Army Burn Lab.
Spammers as auto crash test dummies....

Seriously, I fail to see why spamming hasn't been made as illegal as
making random advertising phone calls at 2 AM. It's a kind of pollution
like obscene phone calls or pouring nasty chemicals down your drain,
and It's not like it's untrackable. And spamcasts have such different
characteristics than normal web traffic, by definition, that I can't
see why the www system hasn't developed a way to kill them. Sure, there
will be some overlap between very small spam-ad casts and subscribed-to
newletters and so on, but a human can tell the difference at the rate
of 1 every 5 seconds or less. If every spammer was tracked down and
heavily fined at that rate, with just one dedicated human doing the
discrimination, I think it wouldn't be long until there were nothing
but beginning spammers. Countries like China could be told to police
themselves or get cut off from US nodes. I'll bet if that happened,
there really would be some fixes THERE to resemble the ones I describe
above.

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian,alt.fan.jai-maharaj,misc.health.alternative,
	sci.med.cardiology,sci.med
Subject: Re: Blueberries lower LDL cholesterol better than statin drugs
Date: 24 Jan 2005 20:06:13 -0800
Message-ID: <1106625973.856641.317090@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>

Oh, crap, another wonderful example of my comments about using rodents
to fit round research pegs in square research need holes, just because
they're available.

For the record, normal rat arteries are horrible models for any human
arterial pathology whatsoever. These are not hypertensive rats. These
are not rats with arterial disease, and certainly not rats with
arteriosclerosis or specifically atherosclerosis (which rats don't
normally get). Even if they were old rats, so what? Rat arteries age as
well as you could wish for. If would be a giant scientific breaththough
if we could make ALL human arteries age even like those of rats who ate
nothing but rat chow, and NEVER ate blueberries. Sheesh.

SBH

From: Steve Harris <sbharris@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: alt.animals.ethics.vegetarian,talk.politics.animals,
	uk.politics.animals,alt.animals.rights.promotion,sci.med
Subject: Re: Lab Experiments 'Terrifying' For Animals
Date: 25 Jan 2005 15:38:57 -0800
Message-ID: <1106696337.225152.79460@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>

> One of the ways is simple desensitization, or exposure therapy. To do
> this, you simply do a lot of handling of the animals in situations
> where they're not hurt.

>>The norm in lab's?

COMMENT: No, but it should be.

> When
> these researchers get hold of rodents, they tend to mistreat them
> because they don't know any other way.

>>You're not trained to treat all animals in a humane manner?

COMMENT:

No, and most people aren't. People rarely care about what happens to
mice and rats. Let me give you an example closer to home.

In Britain about 4 years ago, a survey of the kills of a number of cats
resulted in an estimate that Britain's 7.5 million cats kill 275
million wild mammals and birds each year, and most of them in a far
slower and more painful manner than any lab mouse dies (if you haven't
seen what cats routinely do with mice, you probably are a city person
or don't own cats. It's a little like what a human feels being eaten by
a lion, with the exception that the lion is not likely to play with a
wounded human for half an hour). There has been some controversy about
whether the Brit cat kill number should be decreased by 30% or so to
take care of all the cats that don't hunt, but even if the number is
100 million mice, rats, voles, birds slowly eaten alive, it dwarfs by a
factor of 5 or 10 the number of animals used in all of biomedical
research (which is a few tens of millions of rodents per year). For
this reason, when the Brits talk about pet cat kills, they have to
compare it with the much larger number of wild small-animals killed by
farming or deforestation. They are also very inventive at coming up
with reasons why these animals need to die.

http://www.messybeast.com/cat-wildlife.htm

So why don't all these British antivivisectionists like to talk about
their cat kills vs research rodent kills, in the same breath?  Well,
because it would make them look really silly, is why. All that need be
done is keep the cats indoors. The 100's of millions of small animals
per year are slowly and painfully killed, because Brits like their cats
to be stimulated by being outdoors, is all. It's not even a matter of
saving human lives, but rather a matter of killing 10 times more small
animals than research does, very painfully, for the purpose of *British
cat entertainment.* Which Brits refuse to give up.  Being a more
advanced people, you see.

"I cannot name one single case in which experiments on animals may have
led to a useful result." Dr med. Philippe Grin, G.P., Video Interview
with CIVIS, July 1 1986.
COMMENT:

I'm not responsible for Dr. Grin's ignorance.

SBH