Daniel Engber has a very interesting series of articles over at Slate on Pepper the Dalmation and the use of stolen pets in biomedical research. In 1965, the theft of Pepper from a Pennsylvania farm – she ended up dying in a Bronx lab, sacrificed so that scientists could experiment with cardiac pacemakers – created a media sensation:
The dog-napping of Pepper marked the beginning of the end of canine experimentation. Outrage over her demise, and the theft and killings of other family pets, would soon turn public opinion–and federal law–against the use of dogs in biomedical research. Meanwhile, the rapid growth of American science after World War II had already created a new industry in purpose-bred, standardized lab animals–and the thriving trade in stray mutts and stolen pets would soon be replaced by an assembly line of laboratory flies, rats, and mice. Pepper’s death in the summer of 1965 signaled the end of an era.
It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of animals for modern biomedical research. I can’t think of a treatment for humans, be it pacemakers or brain implants for Parkinson’s, that didn’t involve the sacrifice of countless living creatures. Mice die so that we might live a little longer.
On the one hand, this standardization of lab animals – the breeding of rodents is now a big business – is an important advance. Science needs rigorous controls and nobody wants to have a pet stolen. But it also comes with a high moral cost, since we become completely blind to the toll of scientific progress. We might worry about a beloved Dalmation, but who worries about all those rats in metal cages? (And rats are damn impressive creatures.) I personally believe that most animal research is a necessary evil – I’ve got more complicated feelings about primate experimentation – but that doesn’t mean the public should be allowed to forget it exists. Unless you’re a researcher with the proper security clearance, it’s all but impossible to actually see the animals in their sterile environs: they’re hidden away behind a locked corridor. (As a journalist, I typically ask to see the animal room. I’m almost always turned down, for perfectly understandable reasons. Scientists know that even a brief reference to lab animals in an article can lead to violent threats from animal rights extremists.)
I often wonder how history will judge our use of lab animals. My guess is that it won’t look kindly upon it. (Future generations will absolutely abhor our reliance on factory farms, but that’s a different story.) After all, one of the great themes of post-Darwinian science is the inter-relatedness of life. From the perspective of our cells, there is little difference between a human and a rat, or even a sea slug. All animals use the same neurons and the same neurotransmitters. Pain receptors in different species share a similar design. Blood and flesh and skin are always constructed of the same elemental stuff. We share 98 percent of our genome with chimps. The simple truth is that there is no bright biological line separating homo sapiens from every other animal.
The distinctions are just as murky from the perspective of behavior. Ants exhibit altruism. Parrots use symbolic logic. Gorillas mourn the death of a family member. Humans exhibit all sorts of animal instincts. Most neuroscientists who study consciousness believe that it exists in a gradient, and that chimps are not unconscious, but simply less conscious.
There is a tension here that should be acknowledged. We use animals in research because they are so useful, but the reason they are so useful is because they are so similar in design to us.