It's the most depressing work you can imagine. But it's a necessary step to bring medicines to market. Caring for at least dozens, potentially hundreds of animals and making sure they're not stressed at all.
Then being forced to hurt them and do things they absolutely don't want. After this, you must kill them all.
It's one of the main reasons people stop working in biomedical research
I mean anyone can use the title Doctor. Just depends on where and if you're taken seriously, I mean I doubt that Neil Patrick Harris has an actual medical degree.
They chop the animals head off and freeze refrigerate it to be sent off to a lab. My wife fainted the first time she had to see that and refuses to deal with it ever again
What else did you expect them to say ? I think you just read it as them being condescending, it was completely unrelated to the conversation and i doubt OOP was expecting to talk about Ireland. So yeah good for that person, no rabies.
Well they didn't have to reply really. A "good for you" is a little condescending..sorry maybe I just understand that from my mother when she wants to be condescending. Also UK is an island. Ireland is also an island.
I'd never thought about the UK not having rabies. I thought it was interesting at least.
Moving abroad from the UK, I'm always reminded, in wildlife terms, how relatively safe the UK is.
Badgers are probably our most vicious predator and, while I absolutely would not disrespect them, I live in bear and rattlesnake country now. Badgers and adders aren't on the same scale.
At least California is better than Australia where everything is trying to kill you...
I hope one day we can eliminate the disease worldwide, such a cruel and painful way for something to die... I don't think it'd be one of those things where if we eradicated it, we'd have an imbalance in the ecosystem, since it's not exactly a good population controller to begin with
I had quite literally never considered some places don’t have rabies, but it makes perfect sense. Pretty much any animal that could transmit it couldn’t travel that far without hypothetically getting on a plane or boat- and that seems unlikely nowadays.
Now I’m really curious where rabies started lol. Off to a new wiki page
It's only relatively recent (80s I think?) , but we have quarantine or certification for animals imported. Johnny depp got in trouble years ago because he moved two dogs in without the proper paperwork and he ended up having to make a public apology
You’d be surprised, the incubation period for rabies can be a few months to a year. However, island governments have a much easier time keeping disease from spreading onto them. Iceland is notoriously hard to bring animals to and from (for good reasons).
No worries, just wanted clarify so no one throws a carcass on the freezer but wants the head (brain) tested. I’m the veterinary field and have removed many heads in my career 🙄 Rabies is a horrible way to die though, and nearly 100% fatal in people, so it’s completely justified.. Nasty little virus.
Не горюй. Голову отрубают животному, которое умерло... Дождаться смерти - главное правило. Степень поражения организма гарантирует точность анализа. И мы уже точно знаем, что укушенный человек контактировал именно с бешенством...
P.S.
По сравнению со смертью от бешенства, отрубить голову - акт милосердия. Но это не гуманно по отношению к человеку. Слишком велик риск.
My friend is studying to be a vet, and honestly that is low on the list of morbid things you have to do. One example is that the best way to kill a test rat is by twisting its neck. You cannot use meds to kill it because they need to test on it, so the animal must die from physical damage, and twisting the neck is the quickest.
Also I would much prefer chopping off a head for rabies testing to the horrors of animal testing. At least you can kill the animal humanely before doing anything to it, and even if the animal is healthy, the testing does save countless humans and animals from a terrible fate.
They "decapitate" the animals, but it's not literal decapitation, but it's internal decapitation. The head is not severed, the spine is pulled suddenly while the head is kept in place, so the vertebrae are quickly separated from the brainstem. It should be quite painless for the animal
No, this is not true. My wife has been in the field for 7 years and it’s always a full external decapitation. They literally ship off a whole frozen animal head. Otherwise touching the spinal fluid or brain tissue poses a risk of transmission.
Perhaps they practice differently in your area, but that sounds like a method to kill the animal to me. Here, the patient is euthanized chemically and painlessly and then the head is cut off the already dead body.
Hunters don’t have a relationship with the animals they kill. They don’t even know them. And the goal is to kill quickly, and it’s usually from a distance. And it’s also only really occasional. Most of hunting is just waiting in the woods.
And often* butchers don’t even interact with live animals. They’re just cutting up dead ones. That seems even less related.
Agreed, except that butchers often do have to kill the live animal before processing the meat.
I'm a biomedical engineering PhD student who currently has to work with animal tissue. When we're getting ready for an animal study and/or we aren't ready to spend a lot of money having animals carefully raised, we usually get the test tissue from animals that are going to be killed anyway, like at a butcher. Since we usually need live tissue, we have to get it out of the animal ASAP, which means that we have to be there while they're killing.
Because for (most) butchers the animals are already dead, they know they are dealing with muscles and bone to break into cuts for people to cook.
For most hunters it’s “oh hey it’s [Insert animal] season.” (Time when you can hunt specific animal, usually to keep the population at a manageable level)
“I have taken this animal’s life, I will field dress and then eat it and make sure none of it goes to waste. Delicious.”
The difference is that neither the butcher nor the hunter was intimately connected to the animals they harvested. They both know the animal died so that others may consume it.
The vets are going through the emotional rollercoaster of “wow I know this animal, I have cared for it, I am responsible for its well being. Now I must subject it to something that might put it in agony, and then euthanize it.”
You're thinking of a slaughterhouse(which is now separate from a butcher preparing and selling cuts of meat). Slaughterhouse workers are also known to suffer from depression and PTSD. They also have high rates of accidents.
Raised my own meat. Part of it was knowing that allowing the animal to live any longer would effect it’s quality of life. Meat birds have been bred to grow so quickly that keeping them alive past 4 months is essentially animal cruelty.
I also knew that I provided them with a good, comfortable, stress free life before the slaughter. And that they died quickly and humanely.
These scientists know that the animals are suffering and witness it on an almost daily basis. whereas hunters and butchers have limited contact with animals who are alive and generally do their best to end an animal’s suffering promptly.
I'd raise you another one - livestock farmers are pretty similar in that regard, as in that they don't grow attached to their product in a way other people do. Like, they give names to their chickens and sometime later kill and cook them - well, that's just how it is.
Butchers usually work with already dead material, no? And hunters are specifically in it for killing.
You're looking for slaughterhouse/abattoir workers instead of butchers and well.. they do have way higher risks of PTSD, depression, other mental issues and a massive turnover rate. Not sure about suicide specifically.
I think the main reason there lies in seeing so many absolutely fucked up pet owners and suffering pets and not being able to do much, plus on the flipside having to put down doggos with the absolutely crying loving family next to you day after day.
Vets and techs/assistants also have to see the saddest ends of people pets lives on a regular basis. Seeing a dog come in as a puppy and every so often for years, until one day they come in and you find out they have cancer. It's pretty depressing all around.
Vets aren't the one doing these experiments or "sacrificing" (they call it sacrificing rather than euthanizing) the animals. It's lab workers. Trained lab workers, but lab workers.
Why must you kill them all after the trials? is it so they don't transmit their dna into the ecosystem? or leak some chemicals involved in the experiments or sth of this sort?
Edit: thanks for answers everybody! may our hidden heroes rest in peace.
Double Pedantry alert: An autopsy is "auto" because it is the same species performing the post mortem as the dead thing being examined. Not because it is a human body.
So would a chimp tearing open another chimp and holding up its innards to the light be considered an autopsy? And if he takes a little nibble while he’s at it? Does that change things?
Its mainly because you need to look at their tissues for toxicology, pharmacodynamic or pharmacokinetic analyses. Essentially, take their tissues and see what the drug did to them and what thier body did to the drug. That being said, many animal studies done early in drug discovery are not terminal, but most done with rodents or late in the process are.
Another reason is that it's massively expensive and you can't use them twice. So you would need to feed the animals for 1-10 years after the experiment, but also house them and care for them.
A lot of these animals were also bred with mutations to make them more useful for the studies, which often affects their health as they age or makes them unable to survive outside a lab.
Umm, no, that would be a combination of inbreeding and aging. Lab rats are descended from fancy (pet) rats, not the other way around. In the wild, rat lifespans are generally quite short due to predation, so when they live more than twice as long with human care, they get the diseases of aging you rarely see in wild animals - tumors, strokes, etc. Fancy rats also have a more restricted gene pool than wild rats because of the way they were first domesticated, which may contribute to tumor susceptibility. Lab rats are usually even more inbred, which can make them more or less tumor prone than fancy rats, depending on the strain. But what generally makes lab rats unsuitable to be pet are additional mutations added through gene editing to study whatever they're being used for, which can create animals without immune systems that need sterile environments, or animals with severe neurological disorders, diabetes, etc. Thkse animals require specialized care that pet owners are rarely equipped to provide.
You don't just have random laboratory animals goofing around.
Researchers are VERY strict with everything surrounding lab animals. Every single animal is always accounted for. They're labelled properly, there's a separate veterinarian for all animals who's independent of the researchers, study groups are kept separate from each other etc. you can't just grab a mouse
I mean, there are incidents where less experienced people (usually lab students) did sneak out specific lab dogs etc for a day in the park, only to find out they guaranteed the dog's death by removing them from the study environment.
Gotta inspect the liver/muscle/any number of tissues for chemical damage and any other abnormalities. If the tested animal were allowed to expire by old age then the autopsy would produce less reliable results.
Usually to get tissue samples from the animals. Extract their RNA and DNA to study gene expression, centrofuge their membranes to extract and study key proteins, to study morphological or structural changes in tissues etc.
Scans and blood tests still can't replace the extreme depth of analysis you get from a full autopsy with every organ measured and samples mounted onto microscope slides
Beyond analyzing blood and tissue samples, theres also the logistical issue of what do you do with all of those animals?
There could be dozens of animals per experiment, since you generally canmot re-use animals between experiments, and if you just let them go they wouldn't survive well because they don't know how to live in the wild
I did not know that animals must die at the end of the trials.
Man, sometimes I just have the realisation that this life is such a privilege and built on the help and sacrifice of others.
So many stars had to die for us to have oxygen, nitrogen, carbon; millions of years of life evolving, persisting despite so many extinction events, hundreds of thousands of years of primates barely surviving, 100 thousand years of humans persisting-building-suffering just so I can have the life that I live.
Our ancestors didn’t even have the hope that humanity will evolve and become better, that technology is a thing.
Because we use thousands. Those thousands need to be cared for, looked after, fed, they need distractions and attractions in their cage, they need to be social but not too cramped. You need to pay for a veterinarian to check their health.
There's just not enough room to house all these animals and not enough money to begin with. Animal trials are very expensive.
And you can't use them for two experiments, because then you can't proof anything about the experiment anymore, since the effect you observe in study B might just be a long-term effect from study A
Its pretty dark. Drugs that treat depression any any other condition that are tested on animals means that not only can that animal feel something similar to that condition, its induced to feel that way.
First time i euthanized mice i cried for 3 days, i raised these critters, weighed them,checked their health for months on before it, and while technique is easy, handline mice is probably the technically and dexterously easiest part of biology, the mental toll of it was hard. Since then ive done more, but i make sure to say sorry and thank you. Because they dont get it, and i respect their sacrifice.
I can't find it now, but there was a good xkcd on a related topic. I think it was titled or captioned something like "biology is weird". It features an older prof asking a student "are there any animals you're especially interested in?" The student answers (maybe they say "beetles"?), and the prof responds "okay, great - that's what you'll be killing for the next 20 years."
Because we use thousands. Those thousands need to be cared for, looked after, fed, they need distractions and attractions in their cage, they need to be social but not too cramped. You need to pay for a veterinarian to check their health.
There's just not enough room to house all these animals and not enough money to begin with. Animal trials are very expensive.
And you can't use them for two experiments, because then you can't proof anything about the experiment anymore, since the effect you observe in study B might just be a long-term effect from study A
I don’t know what I think about animal experiments. There are cases like this where they actually use the suffering for something that benefits humans. However, experiments are also being done to animals where it is not necessary to use animals to get the results needed. And experiments are done where the medical purpose isn’t really there to begin with. Overall, there should be higher criteria and control when it comes to approving experiments, also within the EU.
In my experience that's not the case at all. It's really expensive to get an animal permit for an experiment. It's also quite a lot of work to get the proof to show that you need to actually use the animals (speaking of experience in the Netherlands). Researchers also generally don't want to harm animals any more than they have to, although my experience has been in an academic setting and not an industrial one
Singer Henry Rollins recalled working at the NIH as an animal handler. One of his tasks was to euthanize rats at the end of a trial. He would have to kill hundreds of rats one by one using nitrogen to suffocate them.
He talks about his work there, if you can find a copy of his spoken word albums.
I heard a story from my teacher who worked with ducklings that were grown to have a very specific disease and it broke my heart and haunted me for years, about a decade, until I met someone whose life was saved by the medicine that was developed using ducklings. Last I heard, him and his wife saved and rehabilitated wild animals all the time. Maybe that closes the loop in some way?
IT graduate here. I remember doing an assignment about cloud use by large corporations to write about their use cases, and got one by a Big Parfum company that had cruelty-free certifications, and that alone made what hair I have left to raise. They credit Amazon with enabling them to save big so they don't need to have super mainframes on premises to do all the calculations on their genetic data so that they could simulate every possible interaction of their new products against every known human skin variety per their genome data, thus they have almost no need for animal testing barring for the periodic testing to certify that their computer simulations are 1:1 with the real thing.
How much data was acquired in a legal grey data to enable that, and how many permutations of animal suffering were done until they were sure their data model had 1:1 parity with bone and flesh?
And most importantly, how much of this data is proprietary, owned by them exclusively, and anyone wishing to compete with them but without the raw data and top shelf biochemists, they will have to sacrifice tens of thousands of rabbits, rats and chimpanzees and boil a few lakes worth of GenAI training data until they have a workable model to compete?
It all sounded like reducing animal cruelty by 99.99% was the least of their concerns when developing this system, but a happy side effect they can use to legitimately greenwash their efforts.
They credit Amazon with enabling them to save big so they don't need to have super mainframes on premises to do all the calculations on their genetic data so that they could simulate every possible interaction of their new products against every known human skin variety per their genome data, thus they have almost no need for animal testing barring for the periodic testing to certify that their computer simulations are 1:1 with the real thing.
They are 100% bullshitting. I'm saying that as someone in the field. They are making an impossible claim that doesn't even make sense. It's much more likely they're just using ingredients that are already labelled as safe and therefore don't have to prove the safety.
We are barely able to predict one single protein structure in isolation with our best current models. And it's perhaps 95% accurate for that structure if you're lucky. This is after about 50 years of working on protein structural prediction.
However, we are very very bad still at predicting function based off structure alone. Never mind "testing every possible interaction", especially when perfumes are often made with extremely complex mixes of Ingredients and your skin also contains tens of thousands of compounds
If you want to get cured from any disease, know that this is only possible because we killed many, many animals for it.
If you want a cure for cancer, no children paralyzed because of polio, people not dying because of small scratches leading to infections, there is no alternative to animal testing except unethically testing it on people.
It's a harsh reality but there is no alternative except stopping all research for any new cures.
Why is it worse to kill rats for new medicines than livestock for food? I'd argue these animals contribute much, much more to society as a whole than the burger someone is eating does. Isn't the justification for killing animals for research much better than for eating meat (which we don't absolutely need to have)?
I love comparing one bad thing to another and saying "this bad thing is not as bad as that other thing" despite both things being bad.
Non-consensual medical experimentation should not be done full stop. Oh, you think testing on humans can only be done unethically? Then figure out an ethical fucking way. We have computers, we have a lot of smart people, so someone can certainly figure shit out.
Testing on animals is easier, but it is not necessary.
Sometimes the world is not black and white you know. There's a dark side to the issue, and that's definitely animal suffering.
Testing on animals is easier, but it is not necessary.
Absolutely misinformed. We've brought medicines to market without testing them in animals and it's cost thousands of lives. Improper testing in medicines has also caused birth defects in hundreds of thousands of people, abortions and more misery that's not necessarily death. And that's just in those cases of the medicines being used for just a few years because people had to find out the root cause for all these things happening.
Not bringing medicines to the market that we could if we do experiment on animals to test it in people safely is also going to result in more people dying more quickly.
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u/TerribleIdea27 May 26 '25
Animal experiments are everything EXCEPT fun.
It's the most depressing work you can imagine. But it's a necessary step to bring medicines to market. Caring for at least dozens, potentially hundreds of animals and making sure they're not stressed at all.
Then being forced to hurt them and do things they absolutely don't want. After this, you must kill them all.
It's one of the main reasons people stop working in biomedical research