The Animal Manifesto (18 page)

In a paper titled “The Poor Contribution of Chimpanzee Experiments to Biomedical Progress,” veterinarian Andrew Knight reported that few papers based on these experiments are ever cited in future research and that a detailed examination of these medical papers revealed that, rather than animal-related research, in vitro studies, human clinical and epidemiological studies, molecular assays and methods, and genomic studies contributed the most to their development. Knight also showed that in toxicology testing, animal models were frequently equivocal or inconsistent with human outcomes.

The bottom line is that animal models have very limited utility, they are very expensive, and they raise all sorts of ethical questions. Why pursue research methods that harm animals and provide results that are not particularly relevant for humans? Consistent with these concerns, in February 2008 top officials from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency announced a five-year deal to share technology, information, and other resources that will improve the toxicity testing of chemical compounds used in food, medicine, and other products using robots rather than lab animals.

Often it’s not clear why experimenters conduct animal studies when they already have compelling results from human studies. Consider one study that found that monkeys can control a mechanical arm with their thoughts. This research, as reported in 2008 in the
New York Times,
would hopefully help people suffering from paralysis to gain more control over their
lives. What I found interesting was that the article went on to state: “In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.” If scientists already knew this, why use more monkeys? Wouldn’t the most fruitful route for this sort of research, which has very important implications for humans with severe motor deficits, be to study humans?

In the behavioral sciences, two examples of the inadequacy of animal models are the use of maternal and social deprivation (depriving young animals of mothering and other social contact) to learn about human depression, and the use of animals to study human eating disorders, including obesity, anorexia, and bulimia. The deplorable maternal-deprivation studies of Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin proved the obvious, and ever since, socially deprived monkeys have been commonly used to study the psychological and physiological aspects of depression. Individuals typically are removed from their mothers and other family members soon after birth and raised alone, often in small, dark, barren cages called “depression pits.” In their impoverished prisons, isolated monkeys scream in despair, become self-destructive, and eventually withdraw from the world. The only social contacts with these unsocialized, frightened, and distraught monkeys occur when blood is drawn or other physiological measures are taken, or when they are introduced to other monkeys, whom they avoid or who maim or occasionally kill them.

Besides the fact that these types of studies are ethically revolting, numerous flaws plague deprivation studies, including
the lack of human clinical relevance. Researchers view human depression as a distinctly human condition. Simplistic animal models of human depression do not work for the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of human depression. Nonetheless, federal agencies heavily fund (with taxpayers’ money) these studies in which baby monkeys are torn from their mothers and made to suffer panic attacks, anxiety, and depression. Even people who accept other forms of animal research are offended by the horrors of deprivation research. Many in the public believe it should be stopped immediately. No ends justify these means.

Psychologist Kenneth Shapiro has written extensively about the use of animal models in psychological research, specifically in eating disorders. Despite research in which animals are starved, force-fed, or subjected to binge-purge cycles, Shapiro found that only 37 percent of clinicians who treat people for eating disorders even know about the results of such research. Of those who do know about the research, 87 percent said animal models were not used to design human treatment programs. Thus, the success rate of animal models for application in human clinical practice is extremely low. If you had the same chance of arriving at a theater to see a movie, you probably would not even try to go.

For scientific research, the minds and emotions of our fellow animals are simply too much like us to morally justify doing them harm, yet they remain too physically different to make them useful models for helping humans. In February 2006 the prestigious Diabetes Research Institute published a report stating that scientists “have shown that the composition of a human islet is so different than that of the rodent model, it is no longer relevant for human studies.” This bad animal
research leads to bad human medicine. An essay published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
estimated that 106,000 people die each year in hospitals from adverse reactions to drugs that had previously been tested on animals and approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Adverse drug reactions are now the fifth leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease, cancer, stroke, and lung disease. Vioxx, a popular drug for arthritis, caused about 27,500 heart attacks, of which about 7,000 were fatal. According to the FDA, 92 of every 100 drugs that pass animal trials fail during human clinical trials, meaning that about 90 percent of drugs tested as safe and effective on animals don’t work on humans. Plus, more than 50 percent of those that are given to people are withdrawn because of toxic effects on humans not predicted in animal experiments. Drugs would actually be safer if animal testing was eliminated. John Pippin, a cardiologist, points out, “The monoclonal antibody TGN1412 was safe in monkeys at 500 times the dose tested in humans, yet all six British volunteers who received the drug in 2006 nearly died. Conversely, simple aspirin produces birth defects in at least seven animal species, yet is safe in human pregnancy.”

Stress is also a problem in research on captive animals. Jonathan Balcombe and his colleagues analyzed eighty published studies to assess the potential stress associated with three routine laboratory procedures that are commonly performed on animals: handling, blood collection, and the use of stomach tubes (or force-feeding). They published their results in the professional journal
Contemporary Topics in Laboratory Animal Science
in 2004. What they found is that simply picking up a mouse and holding the animal briefly can affect the animal’s heart rate and blood pressure significantly (along with other
stress indicators), and the effects can last from half an hour to an hour. They found that, the particular experiment aside, life in the lab for animals is so stressful that it alone impairs their immune system, which of course affects the results for many types of research, such as tumor growth, cardiovascular disorders, immune function, and psychological studies, among others.

All in all, a paradigm change is needed. It’s not just animal protectionists who argue against animal research. Scientists who care about solid, effective science are also becoming skeptical. Human health and compassion will both improve when research focuses more on humans, rather than on animal surrogates.

“I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn’t. . . . The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.”

— Mark Twain

For centuries, medical schools and universities have cut up animals to teach students. Yet ever since the late nineteenth century, an antivivisection movement has argued that these practices are immoral and unnecessary for learning. Today, schools of all kinds and at all levels around the world are finally banning this practice, not only because of ethical issues, but because nonanimal alternatives are as good or better for teaching. More than thirty published studies show that the use of alternatives such as computer software, models, and transparencies are at least as likely as dissection to achieve the intended educational goals.

Technological advances, in fact, provide overwhelming advantages to dissection — such as imaging that allows students to view the nervous system, to rotate the image, to make certain layers opaque and others transparent, to cut away certain layers, and to repeat these operations in reverse.

Educators around the world agree. At Bhavnager University in Gujyrat, India, the annual use of over three thousand animals has been replaced with alternatives; Israel banned vivisection in schools in 2003; and in March 2008 the Faculty of Zoology at Tomsk Agricultural Institute in Russia ended the use of animals for dissection, even though Russian president and
Time
magazine’s person of the year, Vladimir Putin, harassed rats when he was young.

Medical schools in the United States are also “swapping pigs for plastic.” In an essay in
Nature,
it was noted that while doctors used to try out their surgical skills on animals before being allowed to work on patients, now only a handful of medical schools in the United States still have animal labs. Live-animal experiments were on the curriculum in 77 of 125 medical schools in 1994, but now only about 11 of 126 schools still use them. In January 2008, the
New York Times
reported that all American medical schools have abandoned dog labs for teaching cardiology. The newspaper quoted Francis Belloni, a dean at New York Medical College, as saying that, though animal use “was not done lightly and had value,” students would “become just as good doctors without it.”

Fieldwork — or studying and researching animals in the wild — is far better than studying animals in cages and labs. Yet
fieldwork can also be invasive, and the current regulations used to protect animals are not good enough. In order to study wild animals and track their habits, scientists not only observe animals as unobtrusively as they can but also capture individuals, measure them, weigh them, evaluate their health, often tag them, and then release them; these practices extract a cost on the animal and can lead to misleading data.

For instance, wildlife researcher and veterinarian Marc Cattet and his colleagues recently conducted a study evaluating the long-term capture-and-handling effects on bears. Cattet discovered that these methods can seriously injure and impact the bears, causing scientists to gather spurious data. One bear died ten days after a capture because it suffered from “such a severe case of capture myopathy — a kind of muscle meltdown some captured animals suffer when they overexert themselves trying to escape — that its chest, bicep and pectoral muscles were pure white and as brittle as chalk.”

Further, “blood analyses of 127 grizzlies caught in Alberta between 1999 and 2005 revealed a significant number of those animals were showing signs of serious stress for alarmingly long periods of time after they were processed and released back in the wild,” and about two-thirds of the animals caught in leghold traps suffered muscle injuries.

While Marc Cattet and other researchers aren’t ready to give up wildlife research, it is heartening that he concludes that we can do much more: “I think that a number of things can be done to perhaps minimize restraint times and capture-related injuries,” Cattet said. “We could use motion activated video cameras at trap sites that would allow researchers to assess animals’ reactions to capture. I think that what this study underscores is that the status quo is not the answer. It also
underscores the reality that it is not only bears that suffer. There’s every reason to believe that other animals are suffering too when they are captured and released.”

There are alternatives to trapping and immobilizing animals that work very well. Collecting dung is one. When I visited Iain Douglas-Hamilton and his coworkers as they studied elephants in Samburu National Reserve in Northern Kenya, I had the pleasure of collecting elephant dung with George Wittemyer. Samples of dung are collected, then sent off for genetic analyses that help George and his colleagues further understand the elephants. By analyzing fecal hormones, scientists can get information on stress levels; for instance, it’s known that stress hormones increase when a matriarch is killed and are higher in areas with high levels of poaching. What are called “fecal-centric approaches” to wildlife behavior and ecology are becoming more popular because these scatological techniques are noninvasive.

Research ecologist Robert Long and his colleagues recently published a book titled
Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores
that surely will help wild animals and be a win-win for all involved in field research. John Brusher and Jennifer Schull have developed nonlethal methods for determining the age of fish using the characteristics of dorsal spines. Many researchers realize that they don’t have to kill animals to study them, and we can look forward to the development of more and more noninvasive techniques for studying a wide variety of animals. Even a 2009 essay in the
New York Times
noted the effectiveness of noninvasive research on wildlife, such as the wealth of information that can be gleaned from an animal’s hair.

Admittedly, it’s a difficult situation because we need to do the research to learn more about the animals we want to
understand and protect. But we can always do it more ethically and humanely — to make sure we don’t harm animals in our pursuit of knowledge about them, and to be sure that the information we collect reflects their actual needs and behavior in the wild.

Given the choice, would animals find circuses and rodeos as entertaining as people do? Unlike zoos (which I address next), circuses, rodeos, and other types of animal “performance” don’t promise any higher redeeming value, such as education, conservation, and so on. They are for amusement and entertainment, pure and simple. But, are the animals amused and entertained?