by Hal Herzog
The mouse/rat/bird exclusion means that we have no idea how many animals in total are used in research each year in the United States. I can tell you that exactly 66,314 dogs, 21,367 cats, 204,809 guinea pigs, and 62,315 apes and monkeys were used in biomedical and behavioral experiments in 2006. But no one has a clue about the number of mice used in research in American laboratories. Some experts say 17 million. Others, including Larry Carbone, a lab animal veterinarian at the University of California San Francisco and author of the book What Animals Want: Expertise and Advocacy in Laboratory Animal Welfare Policy, say the number is much higher. Larry puts it at well over 100 million. The larger number is probably closer to the truth.
The Animal Welfare Act has been tweaked often over the years, but the most important amendments were added in 1985 when Congress took on the issue of which studies were worth doing. In Great Britain, every animal experiment must be approved by the Home Office in London. Congress took a different route and placed the responsibility for ensuring the ethical treatment of lab animals on the institutions where the research was conducted. They directed each institution to establish a local Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, or IACUC.
Serving on an IACUC is a tough job. At major research universities, animal care committee members can spend hours each week poring over the fine print in proposals that can run fifteen or twenty pages. Every couple of months, they get together and play God. The members thrash out which proposals to approve, reject, or request more information about. The lives of animals hinge on their decisions, as do scientific careers. Being an IACUC member is a good way to lose friends. But can a committee accurately weigh the benefits of an experiment against the costs in terms of animal suffering?
JUDGING THE JUDGES: HOW GOOD ARE THE
DECISIONS OF ANIMAL CARE COMMITTEES?
Some years ago, I received a phone call from Scott Plous, a social psychologist from Wesleyan University who is an expert on decision making. Both of us were interested in how people think about other species, and we had once run into each other while handing out surveys to activists at an animal rights demonstration in front of the Capitol in D.C.
“Hal, have you ever considered doing a study where you would ask different animal care committees to evaluate the same proposals?” he asked.
“Of course,” I replied. After all, it would be nice to know that the system Congress set up to ensure the welfare of research animals worked, that the University of Texas Animal Care Committee and the Johns Hopkins Animal Care Committee would make the same decisions about the same experiment. “But, Scott, it would be impossible. Scientists are busy. You would never get them to cooperate.”
Scott disagreed. He thought committees would happily participate if you offered them money they could use to enhance animal care at their university. I was skeptical, but said, OK, count me in. Scott pitched the idea to the National Science Foundation and they approved the proposal. He was right—by offering institutions extra funds for animal care, we easily recruited fifty randomly chosen university IACUCs to participate in our study. Indeed, the committees were enthusiastic about the project. In the end, roughly 500 scientists, veterinarians, and community members took part in the study, nearly a 90% response rate.
Each committee chairperson sent us three animal researchers’ proposals their group had already reviewed. After removing identifying information, we sent them the proposals to be re-reviewed by a second committee. The research ranged from studies of how bats find water to the development of eating disorders in mice. In all, the 150 proposals involved over 50,000 animals, mostly mice and rats, but also a smattering of other species—chimpanzees, frogs, buffalo, egrets, pigeons, dolphins, monkeys, sea turtles, bears, lizards, you name it. When the data were in, I flew up to Connecticut to help Scott crunch the numbers and figure out what they meant. I had served as an animal care committee member, and I was sure that there would be fairly high levels of agreement between the first and second IACUCs. I was so wrong.
There are moments of truth in science. For me, it is the fraction of a second between the time you push the enter key on the computer and when the results flash on the screen. Scott and I sat in his office, our eyes on the monitor. I was antsy, feeling a little rush of anticipatory adrenaline, like an offensive lineman waiting to hear the quarterback yell “Hutt!”
Scott pushed the button. The numbers popped up. Our jaws dropped.
About 80% of the time, the second committees made a different decision than the first. Our statistical analysis indicated that the committees might as well have made their decisions by flipping a coin. Clearly, the system was inadequate. Why, I wondered, should it be OK to shock dogs at one university, but not at another one? In retrospect, I should not have been surprised to find that the decisions of animal care committees are wildly inconsistent. It is harder than you think to tell good from bad research. In his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig laid the issue out nicely: “But, if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists?” This is a question that can keep a scientist up at night.
Our findings that different animal care committees often make different decisions were not an anomaly. Studies showing large inconsistencies in peer-review judgments of quality in science go back thirty years. They include studies of ratings of grant proposals, journal article submissions, and the decisions of both human and animal research ethics committees. The truth is that scientists have problems discerning the quality and importance of research. This is a little secret that researchers do not like to think about.
Put simply, the system Congress enacted to oversee the treatment of research animals is fraught with inconsistencies. Why are white-footed mice but not lab mice covered by the Animal Welfare Act? Why are dogs but not cats entitled to a play session every day? Why can a project be given full approval by one animal care committee and flat-out rejected by a different one? Unfortunately, these nagging problems give credence to the charges by anti-vivisectionists that the fox is presently guarding the henhouse.
What can we do? For starters, Congress should extend the Animal Welfare Act to include all vertebrate species—mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. (British animal research regulations even extend to octopuses.) Our data suggest that most scientists also want mice, rats, and birds covered under the Animal Welfare Act. Three-fourths of the animal researchers who participated in our animal care committee study said they disagreed with the Animal Welfare Act’s definition of the word animal.
Of course, we could just dump the present system. We could either let scientists conduct animal research without any external oversight or we could throw a pair of dice to decide which animal experiments should be conducted. Both choices are unacceptable. Some animal rights activists argue for a third alternative. They would have us ban animal research altogether. But people who oppose all animal experimentation are up against their own inconsistencies and paradoxes.
THE ANIMAL RESEARCH PARADOX: USING
ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS TO SHOW THAT YOU
SHOULD NOT CONDUCT ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS
The argument against animal research is based on the premise that mice and chimpanzees fall within the sphere of moral concern but that tomato plants and robots do not. That’s because animals have mental traits that plants and machines don’t possess. For example, the philosopher Tom Regan restricts the possession of rights to species that have consciousness, emotions, beliefs, desires, perceptions, memories, intentions, and a sense of the future. But how do we know which animals have these attributes? The answer, of course, is animal research.
The legal scholar Steven Wise is one of the few animal rights advocates who has seriously grappled with the moral implications of differences in mental capacities among the species. In his book Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, Wise developed a 0 to 1.00 “autonomy scale” on which species are rated according to their cognitive abilities. The rank
ings are based on Wise’s review of scientific studies of animal behavior and cognition. Humans are assigned a 1.0 on the scale; chimpanzees, .98; gorillas, .95; African elephants, .75; dogs, .68; and honeybees, .59. Wise argues that creatures scoring above .90 (great apes and dolphins) are entitled to basic legal rights, while animals with scores below .50 are not. The strength of this approach to animal ethics is that a species’ moral standing is based on evidence of their cognitive capacities, rather than naïve conjectures about their abilities or how much we like them. For instance, after reviewing the science, Wise concluded that African gray parrots have a slightly stronger claim to basic rights than do dogs.
There is, however, a paradox associated with this empirical approach to animal rights—you need to conduct animal research to determine if it is immoral to use a species in animal research. Wise, for instance, assigns dolphins an autonomy scale score of .90, which puts them in the highest category of nonhuman creatures that deserve legal rights. He writes, “Dolphins have concepts and spontaneously understand pointing, gazing, and the holding up of replicas. They instantly imitate actions and vocalizations.” His assessment of the cognitive abilities of dolphins is based on the finding of a University of Hawaii psychologist named Lou Herman. Over three decades of research, Herman has demonstrated that dolphins have extraordinary memories, understand human gestures better than chimpanzees, and have such sophisticated linguistic skills that they will correct your grammar.
Given that Wise bases his case for dolphin rights on Herman’s research, you might think he would be fan of these studies. Wrong. In fact, he vehemently argues that Herman’s dolphin research is unethical, that Herman exploits his animals, and that he treats them like prisoners. The irony, of course, is that without these studies of dolphin cognition, Wise would not be able to argue that the mental abilities of dolphins are comparable to those of chimps and thus dolphins are entitled to legal rights.
What about mice? Where do they fall on the autonomy scale? Wise does not mention them in his book, so I sent him an email: Professor Wise: Where do mice rank on your scale? They are, after all, the most common mammal used in research.
Wise replied that the omission of mice was a matter of time constraints. The autonomy rankings, he said, are based on an objective review of the available evidence for the capacities of each species. This task requires tracking down the latest research reports and interviewing leading scientists who have studied the behavior and cognitive abilities of each species. Wise said that in the cases of apes and dolphins, the data fit his preconceptions. On the other hand, honeybees scored much higher than he ever anticipated. The evaluation process takes roughly three months for each animal, but there are only twenty-four hours in a day and thousands of species.
DO MICE EXPERIENCE EMPATHY?
THE MCGILL PAIN STUDIES
Wise freely admits that we don’t know enough about the minds of most species to accurately place them on his moral status scale. This would seem to mean that we need more, rather than less, animal research. Some of these studies would certainly discover that some animals have unexpected capacities. Researchers at McGill University’s Pain Genetics Laboratory, for example, recently conducted a series of experiments that they think show that mice are capable of empathy. I am not convinced that mucine empathy is analogous to the human experience of empathy, but their findings do raise interesting ethical issues.
The purpose of the studies was to discover whether mice would react to pain inflicted upon other mice. The researchers used several procedures to induce pain in the animals. Most of the mice were given the unfortunately named “writhing test,” in which they were injected in the stomach with a dilute solution of acetic acid. Others were injected in their hind paw with an irritating liquid, and a final group was subjected to the paw withdrawal test which involved measuring how quickly a mouse would lift its feet from a hot surface. If I have calculated correctly, the research involved over 800 mice.
Did the mice feel each other’s pain? The short answer is yes. The animals injected with acetic acid writhed more when tested near another writhing mouse than when tested alone. But—and here is the interesting part—pain contagion only occurred when the other mouse was a relative or a cage-mate. Mice showed no signs of empathy in the presence of suffering strangers!
How does a mouse know if his cage-mate is suffering? Does he see an agonized look in his friend’s eyes or hear their ultrahigh-frequency moans? Or perhaps a mouse in pain emits an odor that signals fear. The researchers checked each of these possibilities by systemically disrupting the sensory systems of mice. Vision was easy. They just put an opaque screen between two writhing mice. Eliminating the sense of smell was harder. After injecting the mice with a local anesthetic, they flooded each of their nostrils with a caustic chemical that fried their smell receptor cells. This procedure permanently destroyed their ability to ever smell anything. To eliminate hearing, they injected mice with a chemical called kanamycin every day for fourteen days. Two weeks later, the mice were permanently deaf.
From a scientific perspective, the experiment was a success. The researchers discovered that mouse empathy is the result of vision alone. The mice deprived of their senses of smell or hearing remained empathetic. The mice that were blocked from seeing their suffering compatriots were not.
Was the research ethical? Pretend for a moment that you are a member of the McGill University animal care committee charged with approving or rejecting research proposals involving animals. How would you have voted? Did the results of the experiments justify the pain and suffering of the animals?
Make your decision: approve or reject.
For me, this is a tough one. The research was well done, and while most scientific articles are never read by anyone except perhaps the author’s mother, the results were published in the journal Science and garnered worldwide publicity. Further, the researchers made a reasonable argument that the pain was relatively mild and short-lasting.
But I vote to reject.
The reason I would not approve the study is that listening to the Rolling Stones played loud is one of life’s great pleasures, and I love the toasty aroma of fresh French bread. Hence, I did not like the idea of deafening and wiping out the sense of smell of so many mice. (I would probably have approved the study if the researchers had agreed to dump the sensory deprivation experiments.)
When I read their research report, my first thought was, “These guys are in deep shit.” I figured they would be getting death threats from the lunatic wing of the anti-research movement. I was completely wrong. The radical Animal Liberation Front, a group that advocates the harassment of animal researchers, prominently featured the McGill mouse pain study on their Web site as proof that humans and mice are kindred spirits. Even some scientists who normally oppose experiments that involve the infliction of suffering and permanent deformity in research animals seemed to tacitly approve of the study. Marc Bekoff is an eminent ethologist and a powerful voice for animal protection. He argues that scientists should not conduct research on animals that they would not do on their own dogs. Thus I was surprised to find that Marc used the mouse pain study in his book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals as evidence that even rodents experience sophisticated emotional states.
Like Marc, Jonathan Balcombe is both an animal activist and a scientist. (His doctoral research was on the behavior of bats.) The author of Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, Jonathan opposes all invasive and painful research on other species and is a popular speaker in animal protection circles. Articulate, thoughtful, and calm, Jonathan is the perfect face for a movement that is often stereotyped as a band of wild-eyed fanatics. Given his opposition to invasive animal research, I was puzzled when Jonathan used the McGill pain study results to argue that mice have emotions in a lecture at a conference I recently attended. Jonathan is an old friend and I called him up to find out how he would have voted if he were on the McGill animal care committee.
“Of course,
I would have voted to reject it,” he said.
“But don’t you find it ironic that so much of what we know about the mental abilities of animals is based on research that would not be permitted if you had your way and experiments on captive animals were abolished?” I asked.
Jonathan was ready for that question. It turns out that he gets asked this a lot during the Q-and-A sessions that follow his talks on university campuses. Inevitably, someone will stand up and ask, “Dr. Balcombe, you oppose animal research, yet your argument that animals are conscious beings relies on the results of experiments that have harmed animals. Isn’t that a contradiction?”
This is not an ethical dilemma for Jonathan. “I hate these studies,” he tells the audience. “If I had my way, we would not allow some of the research that I use to show that animals have feelings. But the fact is that they have already been done, and they do shed light on the question of animal consciousness. So I am going to keep using them. “
It is obvious to me that Jonathan has thought a lot about this issue, but I am surprised when he brings up the Nazi medical experiments in our conversation. The reason is that, prodded by the mouse pain study, I have also been thinking about them. Dr. Sigmund Rasher, a German physician, immersed prisoners in Dachau in frigid water for extended periods to see how long pilots could survive if they were downed in the icy waters of the North Sea. Dozens of his subjects died. By some accounts, this research remains some of the best information we have on the effects of hypothermia on the human body. Some medical ethicists believe that because the data derived from the experiments at Dachau and Auschwitz are already collected, we honor the dead by using the information to save human lives today—even if it was obtained unethically. Others, however, argue that the data are morally tainted, ill-gotten gains that should not be used under any circumstance. Similarly, some animal activists believe that the results of experiments on animals are also ill-gotten gains. They believe, for example, that it is immoral to take medicines that have been tested on animals.