I didn’t make it to the lecture last week from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’s (PETA) Dr. Alka Chandna, but I’ve heard all about what went on. And I’ve heard the whole story before: that animal testing is wrong. That “species-ism” is just as bad as racism or sexism. And that we do horrible things in the labs here at Vassar. I sometimes get involved with PETA for anti-animal cruelty and anti-fur campaigns. I’m also a vegetarian. PETA sends me all types of e-mails and pamphlets about not dissecting and about not testing on animals. It all weighs on my conscience and I really do feel horrible about using animals for research. Yet, when it comes to it, I’m a neuroscience and behavior major. And I work in Professor Kevin Holloway’s lab. And I’m okay with it. Animal testing is unfortunate, but it’s necessary.
I was surprised that PETA chose to come to Vassar to talk about animal testing. I’ve been told from many psychology professors that when inspectors come to our labs to make sure everything is up to code, they often comment that our labs are better than the government’s. Our mice and rats have big cages with access to food and water. The quails, which I work on with Professor Holloway, have open access to food and water. I don’t have a lot of access to the animal labs in Olmstead Hall, but from the little I’ve seen, nothing looks like the terrible, awful labs that you see on PETA flyers. Vassar lab animals have it pretty good. When a research project involving animals is being designed and ultimately proposed, scientists try to reduce as much animal testing as possible. They also try to involve the least amount of surgery, the least amount of subjects and the least amount of suffering. A project won’t receive funding if there is any extraneous or unnecessary work done on animals. The goal of animal experimentation isn’t to torture an animal just to find out “how it ticks.” We know all of that from previous studies and we don’t have to replicate some of the horrible things that happened in the past. Now, scientists use animals to help the animals in turn or to study similar effects in humans.
If this were a perfect world, we would be able to test everything on humans. Humans and animals would be considered equals and since we’d be the ones conducting the experiments, we would perform them on ourselves. The world, however, does not work like that. I regret that animals are considered below humans and can therefore be sacrificed for science. But that’s how things are: the way we conduct research on animals isn’t perfect, but it’s the best we have in the way of studying the models of human physiology, behavior, immunology and biology.
For this reason, I doubt we will ever completely get rid of animal testing in the scientific community. Instead of putting in effort and putting on protests to get this to change, I choose to take advantage of my time at this research-minded university to find some answers.
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