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> Each Rodent Habitat can support up to ten mice or six rats providing sufficient room for the animals. Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, thei

> Each Rodent Habitat can support up to ten mice or six rats providing sufficient room for the animals. Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, their health and wellbeing probably isn't the biggest concern for the scientists involved -- but unless this is hooking into a much larger habitat than the pictures indicate, lol this is not even close to sufficient space for 6 rats to live in for several months. It's not sufficient space for 1 rat. Again, I'm trying to figure out if there's a larger environment and the article just isn't indicating it? So maybe I'm wrong and there's an actual environment here that just isn't pictured? But if the pictures of the habitat are the actual habitat... keeping 6 rats in a space the size of one of these containers for a month is very literally torture for the animals involved, plain and simple. In most cases a group of 2-3 rats should have at least a full-height human-sized cage with multiple levels (and they should still regularly be given time outside of that cage in a larger environment), and ideally for 4-5 rats they should have double that space. ---- And for this research where they're basically just asking "did space do anything to their organs" I doubt the scientists care, but there is a reproducibility problem surrounding rat research that boils down to "animals act differently when they're cooped up in inhumane conditions for months at a time." The most famous of these examples off the top of my head being the "rat utopia" experiment where a scientist stuck around 40 rats into a habitat that was barely big enough for 2 rats, then gave them literally zero stimulation of any kind, and when they predictably freaked the heck out out he then tried to pass it off as some kind of novel insight into the nature of societal collapse, population limits, and an intrinsic psychological need for competition. In fact the more obvious conclusion would have been "when actively tortured, animals act weird." It's kind of a wild experiment because if you're not familiar at all with rats it sounds insightful -- to the point where researchers actually called the environment a "rat utopia". But if you are at all familiar with rat behavior it has all of the scientific credibility of Jigsaw writing up a formal paper about what the barbed wire maze he built in his basement proves about the human condition and urban planning. If the only thing you're doing to rats is dissecting them, then unless the stress increases disease it won't mess with results. For determining the impact of space on a rat's body, I don't know how much the rat's quality of care changes anything about the outcome. The cage being shown isn't big enough for them to exercise, but I don't know if them being able to exercise is even relevant to the test. But for any experiments that are more extensive, how the animals are cared for can significantly change the results you get: it can affect the likelihood of disease in the rodents, it can affect what problems they're more prone to exhibiting and how quickly they recover from operations and how they react to treatments. And of course it affects behavior.

kmeisthax 3y ago
Cages so small even PetSmart is waving it's hands and saying "That's too cruel for me"
throwaway290 3y ago
> Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, their health and wellbeing probably isn't the biggest concern for the scientists involved But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans). We make moral tradeoffs to cause suffering when required in the name of science but it should be imperative to try to avoid it in other cases. > how the animals are cared for can significantly change the results you get Recall how they raised lab temperature by 1 degree and had reduced rates of cancer in mice... or something like that.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans). You'll get no argument from me on the morals and implications, I completely agree. But I'm less making a moral statement about how research should be conducted and more just acknowledging the fact that a lot of people don't care about whether or not rats are tortured in the first place. Not that they're going out of their way to induce suffering (with the exception of experiments like the rat utopia which was basically Cave Johnson levels of arbitrary cruelty for no reason masked under the guise of science) -- but if the choice is between torturing a rat for a month or building much more complicated housing on a space station, a lot of people will shrug their shoulders and say "stinks for them, but they're rats, who cares." The darkly humorous thing about this article is that the page is describing these containers almost with a sense of pride about how advanced and humane they are. I think we like to have this mental model of animal research where animals are well cared for and they do have this final sacrifice at the end, but we're doing the best we can otherwise. And I want research to be as humane as possible, but I'm not naive about the reality of how animals are often treated during research and how low the standards we have on animal welfare actually are -- humane research is a goal and ideal more than it is a reality. I'm not going to get into the ethics of it, I'm just saying that keeping rats in a container this size for a month is with no exaggeration psychological torture for the animals involved; anyone who has any experience with rat behavior will tell you that a rat will be absolutely miserable in that environment. The euthanasia at the end is the kindest part of the experiment. And people can take away whatever conclusions they want from that. I'm not telling anyone they have to care whether the experiments are humane, and I don't want to ignore that there are plenty of people who don't really care about rats. I'm not telling anyone what their response should be, I just don't want people lying to themselves and pretending that the experiments are in any way humane if they're not.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Cages so small even PetSmart is waving it's hands and saying "That's too cruel for me"

throwaway290 3y ago

> Given that the animals are going to be euthanized, their health and wellbeing probably isn't the biggest concern for the scientists involved But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans). We make moral tradeoffs to cause suffering when required in the name of science but it should be imperative to try to avoid it in other cases. > how the animals are cared for can significantly change the results you get Recall how they raised lab temperature by 1 degree and had reduced rates of cancer in mice... or something like that.

danShumway 3y ago
> But it should be. Saying "it doesn't matter because they'd be dead anyway" opens all sorts of slippery slopes if you apply it to other animals (eg. humans). You'll get no argument from me on the morals and implications, I completely agree. But I'm less making a moral statement about how research should be conducted and more just acknowledging the fact that a lot of people don't care about whether or not rats are tortured in the first place. Not that they're going out of their way to induce suffering (with the exception of experiments like the rat utopia which was basically Cave Johnson levels of arbitrary cruelty for no reason masked under the guise of science) -- but if the choice is between torturing a rat for a month or building much more complicated housing on a space station, a lot of people will shrug their shoulders and say "stinks for them, but they're rats, who cares." The darkly humorous thing about this article is that the page is describing these containers almost with a sense of pride about how advanced and humane they are. I think we like to have this mental model of animal research where animals are well cared for and they do have this final sacrifice at the end, but we're doing the best we can otherwise. And I want research to be as humane as possible, but I'm not naive about the reality of how animals are often treated during research and how low the standards we have on animal welfare actually are -- humane research is a goal and ideal more than it is a reality. I'm not going to get into the ethics of it, I'm just saying that keeping rats in a container this size for a month is with no exaggeration psychological torture for the animals involved; anyone who has any experience with rat behavior will tell you that a rat will be absolutely miserable in that environment. The euthanasia at the end is the kindest part of the experiment. And people can take away whatever conclusions they want from that. I'm not telling anyone they have to care whether the experiments are humane, and I don't want to ignore that there are plenty of people who don't really care about rats. I'm not telling anyone what their response should be, I just don't want people lying to themselves and pretending that the experiments are in any way humane if they're not.