“How can you reduce animal pain and increase their comfort in your laboratory?”
This is not a question I ask myself often, as I do most of my research among humans. However, I am somehow on the mailing list of Lab Animal Welfare Compliance – get your sample copy here – which is a magazine for people who test things on rats, etc. This week it features an interview with Bernard Rollin, a bioethicist based in Colorado, who is not impressed by all the experiments he sees…
In perhaps his most controversial beginning advice, Rollin suggests avoiding what he calls the “mindless scientific method.”
Example: Rollin recalls working with PIs [Principal Investigators] seeking an alternative for knife castration of beef cattle, which was conducted with anesthesia traditionally. The PIs were testing whether a reproductive hormone that served as immunological castration would be a more humane method. They gave 100 bulls injections, and had a control group of 100 bulls that were to be knife castrated.
“Those researchers could have used historical controls,” Rollin says. “Members of the research team have witnessed thousands of these before. You don’t need 100 more. That’s the ‘mindless scientific method’ — you don’t need to prove the obvious.”
Ouch.
