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37 responses to “lab rats”
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Naked Mole Rats are generally cuter in behavior than looks. Plus they can chew through concrete (eventually), which is pretty remarkable for something that size. Truly, though, naked lab rats are uglier. Those look to me like lab mice, but I dunno– I guess the fur makes the rodent.
Hmm, I’ve got some pictures I’ve taken of naked mole rats, let me get them into a set real quick…
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Saint Francis of Assisi
"Not to hurt our humble brethren (the animals) is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission – to be of service to them whenever they require it. If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." -
So there’s a mole rat fan club out there! Check out Sunburn’s link 4 comments back. He has some endearing tidbits in the comments…..
You can also see our heroes in the movie Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control which profiles Rod Brooks and Ray Mendez, fellow Mole Rat fan:
"Then I got interested in the mole rats. Mole rats spend their entire lives digging tunnels. They have a rigid social system. They’re like wasps or bees – there’s a queen and workers. Mole rats dig at random, looking for tubers. Maybe they find a tuber, or maybe they don’t. They just dig away. At one point I had thought the mole rats addressed the Utopian ideal of what it would be like if there were no crime or criminals, if you could say hello to your neighbor and your neighbor would say hello in return and we’d all be assured that no one would attack us with an axe. Is aggression innate in mammals? Well, supposedly not in mole rats. The mole rat was thought to be the only mammal that lives in harmony with its fellow-mammals, its fellow mole rats. The only. But it turns out that mole rats are nonviolent only under certain circumstances – that, in fact, they can be really nasty critters after all, who at times really do seem to hate one another."So, gosh, was Saint Francis A sissy?
( Just kidding, Z 😉
And, I do not know of mice and men. I titled it "lab rat" in the generic sense of lab denizens… including the people.
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As deplorable as your intervention?
Congrats, Steve, you made it to the flickr blog!!!. Well, not you, the little fellows. 😉
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I think it was in "Fast, Cheap and out of Control" that someone mentioned that you have to make sure the palm of your hand is really tense if you put a mole rat on it, because if it feels even remotely soft, the animal will start digging with its teeth. I saw mole rats at the Toronto Zoo and found them fascinating and not half as ugly as they are made out to be.
The guys up there are definitely rats – you can tell by the shape of their heads and ears (mouse ears are rounder, their faces shorter). I just hope they don’t torture them in that lab.
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well, it’s not like labs are just a cleaner version of abu ghraib. sticking electrodes on their tiny genitals or making nude nude mice pyramids…
i think you’ll find they are actually nude mice. sorry, there’s no wiki entry yet (!)
have you ever had cancer? ever know someone who had cancer? these little guys are a key element in discovering new genes and drugs that might be involved in causing and curing cancer, as well as inflammatory diseases like arthritis or bowel disease. they are not ‘tortured’. all experiments are approved by an ethics committee, which include laypeople from the community.
sorry i couldn’t be more precise, it’s not exactly my field.
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There are hairless varieties of rats, too.
Not all experiments on animals are about finding a cure for cancer or other terrible diseases. Jeez. I know someone here in the U. S., for example, who experiments on monkeys. She is a neuroscientist and does research on some basic brain functions. This is not about finding a cure for any disease. The monkeys have a horribly boring life. They are confined to small cages. They never see the daylight. They have electrodes implanted in their brains. After two years, they get killed. And those experiments, too, were approved by an ethics committee. – And yes, I actually know someone who has cancer: My two pet rats. They, like all pet rats, are descendents of lab rats, who were bred to get cancer at some point for research reasons.
But I don’t want to get all PETA on you. There certainly are non-cruel animal experiments, for example ones that explore their behaviour, and I was just expressing my hope that the above rats are going to be subjected to that variety. And there certainly are cruel animal experiments that can somehow be justified as serving some noble cause. But this is a complex ethical problem, and certainly more complex than cancer polemics.
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firstly, apologies if the above post sounded condescending. totally not meant to, perhaps i was reacting more to j…’s somewhat unconstructive comment.
yes there are nude ratties, but these little dudes look like their fore- and hindlimbs are closer together than a rats. then again, the heads are rather elongated… i dunno. maybe jurvetson can find out? it’s a bit weird they were left lying around in a corridor.
fair pont about the monkeys, i don’t know if i could work with primates myself. but i guess i would say that even basic research is supposed to be heading in a therapeutic direction in the end. after all, we have to know how something works normally before we can work out how to fix it when it breaks.
or maybe the research will eventually be used to design brains for robots so that they can one day hunt us down and kill us like the dogs we are 🙂
in the end there are so many things in the world to rail against: 3something million dead in the congo, genocide in the sudan, kids growing up medicated to the eyeballs… blah blaah blah i’m sure you could name a hundred more… experimenting on mice/rats/monkeys for disease cures/basic research doesn’t rate up there in my book, but i understand some people have a different opinion.
friends?
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Just FYI
From Darwin to Dawkins: the science and implications of animal sentience
A spectacularly warm day in March 2005 brought 600 delegates from 50 countries to London for CIWF Trust’s international Animal Sentience conference.Concluding the conference, the following statement was given over-whelming support as an ongoing animal sentience mission.
"This conference calls on the UN, the WTO, the World Animal Health Organisation (OIE) and their member governments to join us in recognising that sentient animals are capable of suffering, and that we all have a duty to preserve the habitat of wild animals and to end cruel farming systems and other trades and practices which inflict suffering on animals."
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Thanks Z et. al. I was out today on a pilgrimage to Vancouver (aka flickr-mecca).
Polkadot: Corona posts are the best conversation starters. =)
Tho-mask: These little guys were not in a hallway; I was walking through the lab to get to a bathroom. They are involved in the development of therapeutics for a variety of conditions, including cancer.
People clearly feel pretty strongly about the tradeoffs here. It reminds me of a construction tour I took of the new Bio-X building at Stanford. The animal lab is in a secure area in the basement. It has the interesting feature of an escape tunnel that goes a fair distance away from the building to an unmarked exit in a nearby parking garage.
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I visited a lab in Germany once where they have very nice facilities for their monkeys. They have a big enclosure where they can move freely and interact while they’re not in experiments, even though they have electrode arrays cemented into their skull. Apparently it’s now possible to keep these from getting infected even when the monkeys fiddle around with them. They also have a nice outside area for the monkeys, but don’t dare let them go there for fear of animal activists breaking in.
An interesting historical perspective is that I once heard a neurophysiologist complain that it’s so hard to do experiments on monkeys these days, because you can’t water deprive them any more to motivate them. A few decades ago, it was considered all right to make them really thirsty in order to get them to cooperate. Now only positive reinforcements, i.e. juice rewards, are allowed.
The animal facility here in Berkeley is similar, two stories below the ground, the entrance in an unmarked hallway that opens to a driveway. I don’t know about escape tunnels, but I’m sure they’re there.
Just another reason for me not to do animal work.
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Though furless and controversial, I feel these conspiratorial rodents deserve a place in the Disturbing Small Furry Animals group.
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I thought this was a good place to wish a -belated-: Happy Animal´s Day! April 29 in Argentina.
Jelly fruity cakes, palm leaves filled with fruits and other delicatessen only available for animals. Humans only cooked, delivered and watched. =D
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Yikes! Please consider posting this and any other photos you have with 1000+ views in 1000 Views
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Hi, I have a whole set about lab prisoners. In case you are interested:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/equality/sets/577099/I am strongly against non-human animal experimentation as well as I am against non-voluntary human animal experimentation. This is another speciesist practice that can’t be justified.
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Big thanks for using creative commons!
I used your photo in the following research news:
Möss utsatta för jetlag dör (swedish)You can find the english press release that we used here:
Chronic jet-lag increases mortality in aged mice. Current Biology
Its som signes that Flickr cant handle so you will have to search the website.Im not that impressed with the research. Seems useless.
Good luck with camera!
Hans -
Right! None of us should give a shit because humans are dying and these are only animals. Isn’t that the same old excuse experimenters have been saying for a century? First, "we" experimented on poor women and children because hey, the white male in a white coat is a Demi-god saving the world right, next it was – black people are sub-humans so we can experiment on them and now that’s all illegal, well sort of, it’s he animals that aren’t considered worthy of consideration. Minus the fact that animal experimentation is NOT saving human lives it is in fact creating a lot of human deaths and where’s that cancer cure/Alzheimers/diabetes/ALS cure? There is no competition in caring. In fact animal welfare people are MORE likely to care about violence, disease and war then people who can’t see the intersectionality of oppressions.
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