I do it. (Vivisection)

Member Name: magpie

Product:	Vivisection
Date:	18/12/00 (427 review reads)
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I have had to think very carefully about whether to write this opinion. I hope I can inform you, and I also hope you will not be offended.

Many writers have already discussed vivisection in great depth, but I hope I can give you another angle - that of a vivisectionist.

I work as a researcher into the brain mechanisms of learning and memory. This research involves working with male rats.

In order to do this research, I attended a course about animal ethics, surgical techniques, and the law. I then sat an exam, before I could obtain my personal home office license. This license allows me to carry our certain procedures on rats. Aswell as my personal license, my boss has a project license - this limits the procedures we are allowed to do, and explains their purpose. In addition, we have an institutional license - this ensures the facilities the animals are kept in, and worked on, are to a particular standard. Before any animal work can be done, all of these licenses must be granted.

At any point an inspector from the home office will arrive at the lab, and demand to see paperwork, health records, the animals, surgical procedures, and so on. If anything is wrong, he can demand the animals are put down, or revoke any of our licenses. We also have a vet who checks out the animal health.

These are the procedures which govern our use of animals, and hopefully limit any suffering.

I will not try to morally justify the work I do with animals. The work is important for the advancement of the understanding of the brain.

It is important to understand the brain, and how animals learn, I'll try and tell you why (I'll try not to be too technical!).

For example:

Drug discovery research programs use behavioural techniques to evaluate whether certain drugs interfer with anxiety. One of the behavioural techniques is to examine conditioned fear (that is - present an animal with a 10-se
c tone, followed by mild electric footshock. Subsequently the animal will display fear responses during the tone). If a certain drug interferes with that conditioned fear response, then it may be a useful anxiolytic. However, the work I do examines other possibilities. Is it that the animal doesn't know when to be frightened, can't express fear, can't associate the tone with the shock, fails to percieve the shock, etc. In actual fact, my work involves looking at learning about rewarding events - responding during a tone which has been presented with food reward. The nature of the deficits specific brain lesions cause are subtle, and often hard to characterise. As such, it is important that we can disern the role of these different brain regions in learning.

Another arena my work has an impact on is neural networks. Because different components of behaviour are seperable by lesions, this can help figure out sensible strategies for machine learning.

In addition, the basic learning rules which have been determined in my field using rats, are used to evolve training programs for children with learning difficulties.

These are the reasons why what I do is important, although my own work is not directly related to drug discovery or human problems.

I sometimes hate what I do. Animals do suffer - it would be foolish to say that they don't. Sometimes they get ill. Sometimes they die under anaesthetic. Sometimes they develop tumors. Sometimes they fight with their cage mate. However, I actively work to minimize the suffering they endure. By being considerate, monitoring health, and using well designed experiments, I minimize the number of animals used, and their suffering.

I want to make it clear that I am not a faceless arrogant scientist. I get upset when my animals suffer. I get angry when protocols designed to protect the animals are ignored. I get furious when an experiment is badly designe
d, and animals lives are wasted. All these things happen. And so I can justify what I do, as at least I do it well.

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