Mice Studies Prove Humans Are Dumb

Nothing says more about the state of humanity than our attitudes towards animals and our treatment of them. We in our modern scientific civilization have depended on a view of animals as machines, or as dead meat even when alive.

As machines we use them for our experiments. But they aren't machines, which not only calls into question our ethics but our science. An article in the New Scientist last summer (not online) by two American scientists describes how willful blindness has compromised experimental results, with consequences for human health as well as morality.

Because rodents are treated as machines, and machines don't care where they are as long as they are maintained, mice are kept in bare cages while their bodies deal with our drugs and their genes are taken away or new ones introduced. But those cages aren't neutral. They cause stress that manifests in fairly obvious but ignored ways. These manifestations are either considered "natural" or otherwise discounted. They include aggression in males, so "males in particular will spend much of their time fighting if kept in these conditions. However, if they are given a couple of simple diversions...the fighting disappears."

Physiology is affected as well as behavior, which compromises results by adding "uncontrolled variables," not to mention suffering. "Moreover, we now know that mice display empathy...so stress experienced by one animal can affect others, too."

Noise is "a major source of stress for lab animals," which again causes physical effects and comromises results. The authors point to a study on genetic mutations that initially concluded that mice missing a particular gene developed a heart defect. Yet when the experiment was conducted again on mice living in better conditions, "those defects virtually disappeared."

This study shows "that lab animals' environmental conditions can completely change the results of a genetic study" ("one of the most clear-cut types of animal studies") But, the authors conclude, "This too seems to have fallen on deaf ears since it was published in February [2007]." This article in New Scientist was published in the June 2 issue, and apparently roundly ignored as well.

So lab mice are showing that environmental factors affect health, and that humans are blind and deaf to the power of environment, the interplay between psychology and physical health and behavior, and the biological realities of nonhuman animals. Makes you wonder who is experimenting on who.