Wrote this for my Phases column which I share with Tee Shern Ren. Sarah Lee bitching me out for being late again because I forgot which week it was =P
The mice freeze as I open the “shoebox” cage: a polycarbonate box with a simple steel grille top that holds brown pellets of rodent diet and a water bottle. Eight clear eyes peer up from little faces sweet as a bed of pansies. One animal rushes into a corner of the cage; the others hold their ground, paws planted squarely, vibrissae whiffling around as my hand invades their little world. The lilac spots on their pure white fur – crystal violet marks for identification – add to the enchanting effect. I scoop up the first mouse with one hand and grasp her tail with the other.
I have read that mice sing in the ultrasonic. Roald Dahl wrote a story called “The Sound Machine” about a man who found a way to hear the voices of plants, and was driven mad when he cut a tree and heard it scream. I wonder if I could hear this mouse crying out now, perhaps by using a bat detector. He who has ears, let him hear. One of the guidelines for evaluating pain and distress in laboratory animals is that if a procedure would be painful if performed on a human, it should be considered to be painful in an animal.
“I did some calculations and figured out that for a twenty-gram mouse, a hundred-microlitre injection [one tenth of a millilitre] is the equivalent of injecting a six-pack of beer into your leg.” Flash back to a seminar on laboratory rats back in March - the man holding the white rat is lecturing us about appropriate volumes of blood samples and injections. Back in the present, I grit my teeth seeing how quickly my coworker pushes the plunger down, injecting our little friend with the vaccine we’re testing. Slow down, I want to tell her, imagining the stream shooting into my own thigh, under such high pressure that it hits nerves like a steel spike. I can’t. She has had more years of experience than I have of life.
She refers to all our animals – white mice, and cotton rats, a North American rodent - as “it” or the generic “him”, even though they’re all female. Perhaps after a time one no longer sees them as individuals, so sex doesn’t matter. I don’t think, however, that scientists see their animals as mere tools, as the animal-rights groups would have us believe. Maybe some do, but the irony is that many researchers and technicians who work with laboratory animals are in their jobs because they have an awe and respect for life, as I do. Careers that allow us to study the wonders of life often put us in positions of causing harm and pain. To deal with the emotional conflict, people develop coping strategies – thinking of the animals as objects to be processed when you have to give them shots, using euphemisms like “challenge” instead of “infect”, and so on.
Why am I doing this? I ask myself. “Because it’s my job” is a totally stupid answer. A slightly better one might be “To save endangered species”, since our goal is to develop a vaccine that can protect black-footed ferrets and prairie dogs against a deadly disease. However, this is only partly satisfactory. Even though the extinction of a species is an irredeemable tragedy, is it only an artificial distinction to say that one group of animals is more important than the other? And in science, there is always the possibility that your invention will not work, and the animals have been killed to prove a negative, a null hypothesis.
I don’t care much for animal rights activists. A lot of self-professed animals lovers are fuzzy-minded pet hoarders who regard their cats and dogs like children, saying “Animals have feelings too” without ever considering the feelings of the chickens, sheep, and cows that died in the mechanised chaos of an abattoir to feed their babies. A few others are literal terrorists who blow up labs and threaten life-saving research, valuing the lives of scientists and technicians about as much as a member of Al Qaeda values those of infidels. Even though I scorn those who say humans and animals are equivalent, I still feel and believe that animal life is of great value and cannot – must not – be taken lightly. I learned this the hard way when, as a ten-year-old, I broke open a cicak egg to look at the embryo. The pink baby lizard twitched this way and that for a few minutes and then died. The guilt that pierced me was sudden and unforgettable.
The argument against the concept of “animal rights” is based on the humanist idea of the social contract. This is an implicit agreement that if one does certain things for other people, other people should do certain things in return. Animals don’t have the ability to participate in this contract with humans. In fact, we can hurt animals by trying to force them to think and interact with us as other humans do, because they simply can’t (this is called “theory of mind”, assuming that your pet is like you). Acknowledging that they’re beings with different minds and senses is not belittling them in any way.
If animals do not have rights in that sense, where do our obligations toward them come from? Human responsibility toward animals begins to make sense if one looks at it from the theistic perspective. All life comes from the Giver of life, and no conscious life is a toy to be taken apart and thrown away at random, but a fellow creation.
To guide my conscience, I keep in mind what CS Lewis wrote about vivisection (an old word for experimentation on animals, literally meaning to “cut alive”): “If on grounds of our real, divinely ordained, superiority a Christian pathologist thinks it right to vivisect, and does so with scrupulous care to avoid the least dram or scruple of unnecessary pain, in a trembling awe at the responsibility which he assumes, and with a vivid sense of the high mode in which human life must be lived if it is to justify the sacrifices made for it, then (whether we agree with him or not) we can respect his point of view.” May my care be such that whatever comes of this work be worth the blood I take and the pain I inflict.
In the Biblical creation story, the first people were told to “take care” of the garden of paradise. They were the first naturalists, giving names to all the animals that God showed them. In primitive societies and in parts of the developing world today, people still have economic and cultural dependencies on the animals around them. Recall Jesus’ rhetorical question about rescuing an animal that fell into a well on the Sabbath. In this day and age when animal flesh is bought and sold as a commodity (a friend told me that her cousin from KL screamed and ran away the first time she saw a live chicken), we might do well to consider the sacrifices of the Old Testament and other ancient societies. They were reminders that people might manage flocks and herds, but that life ultimately belonged to God.
The second mouse is marked with a lilac spot on her head. I reach out and take her up by the tail...
- ILAR Journal: from the Institute of Laboratory Animal Research has papers about the ethics of using animals in research, refinement of procedures using animals, and how scientists are affected by what they do.
- Jon Katz on Slate.com: a writer (nonfiction as well as novels) who’s kept and keeps several dogs, examining the ways we connect with them as companions with different minds.
- Is Humane Slaughter of Fish Possible for Industry? a little weird and random to include here, but just because they’re cold-blooded and live in the water doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider their treatment. Plus, killing fish more quickly and painlessly makes for better-tasting filets...my precious.
- World's Scientists Admit They Just Don't Like Mice: This one’s a joke. The Onion is a satirical newspaper that makes stuff up.
