• Question: do you experiment with animals

    Asked by gelshywough123 to Helen, Jenni, Mark, Martin, Stu on 14 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by etherdenc09, saska, snowdenjwh.
    • Photo: Jenni Tilley

      Jenni Tilley answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      Not *with* animals, but I do look at tendons *from* animals. I have to make so very interesting (and smelly) trips to abbatoirs to collect my samples, generally bits of the animal that would just be thrown away anyway like cows feet.

    • Photo: Helen O'Connor

      Helen O'Connor answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I dont experiment with animals, as I am mostly interested in human thoughts, feelings and behaviour. But we have learnt a lot about how we learn behaviour by being rewarded or punished from some very early animal studies – like Pavolv’s drooling dogs, or Skinner’s pigeons 🙂

    • Photo: Mark Burnley

      Mark Burnley answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      I do experiment with animals – other humans! I also know people who have done experiments with both conscious and aesthetised animals to find out about things like blood flow within the capillaries, which is impossible to measure in humans during exercise. There are very strict rules about using animals in experiments, so if a procedure is terminal (that is, the animal will not be able to survive afterwards because nerves, blood vessels or even organs have been removed), then the animal MUST NOT be awake during the experiment, and must be put to sleep without being woken up at the end of the experiment.

      The people I have worked with who also work with animals are animal lovers, believe it or not. One scientist I know is very interested in the performance and physiology of race horses. So he set a lab with a really big treadmill and a really big face mask (so he could collect the horse’s breath) and found out all sorts of interesting things about the horse. For example, he discovered that when racing, almost all horses damage their lungs. The pressure within the lungs and the blood stream are so extreme that the horse bleeds into its lungs. You can sometimes see this blood on a race horse’s nostrils (although the TV cameras try to avoid showing it). He then found that putting a nasal strip on a horse can reduce the extremes of pressure in the lung and so reduce the bleeding, prolonging the race horse’s career and its life (some countries put bleeding horses down straight away). Finally, the horses he used in his experiments were ex-race horses that may otherwise have been put down because nobody seemed to want them, and when the experiments were over he made sure he found them all a good home.

      We might not like the idea of animal experiments, but sometimes they can be very positive for the animals involved, and the discoveries made in those experiments where animals unfortunately die can be used to develop treatments for other animals, both pets and in the wild.

    • Photo: Stuart Mourton

      Stuart Mourton answered on 14 Jun 2011:

      As mark has said, the rules on working with animals are very complex. All my studies involve working with humans as we can prod, poke and do lots of other things we couldn’r do with animals. This is mainly because we can explain to a subject what we will be doing to them, and make sure they are happy with it before you start testing them. You are obviously not able to do this with animals.

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