Remember these? Well, these home X-rayed mice were indeed dead mice. (I don't know how they got dead. Maybe old age, natural causes, or suicides.)
But Basement & Garage Science marches on:
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To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
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t**** a***** wrote:
I was thinking about doing a live mouse or rat next for youtube, Whats your opinion on live animal subjects with xray illumination? I can only do 15 second exposures.
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I haven't accidentally bumbled into a hot-button controversy here in ... gosh, months. Maybe I'm losing my edge. So ...
Amateur rocketry faces the question of sending live animals on violent half-mile vertical round trips, and when the question is discussed openly (e.g., by scouting adults rather than by a flock of unsupervised 10-year-old boys), has evolved two generally accepted answers.
* First, limit the passenger candidates to insects (ants and cockroaches) or to vertebrates not more advanced than frogs or lizards.
* Second, to get a live animal "license," a rocketeer must first launch and successfully recover a raw egg without cracking it and making a gooey mess. (The payload nose cone of one rocket kit is specifically designed for this challenge.) Only after recovering an unscrambled egg or two is the rocketeer permitted to move on to live passengers.
Who cares about zapping live mice or rats with x-rays? At first glance, seemingly nobody. After all, any pet store that caters to snake owners sells live mice specifically for feeding snakes.
But any basement or garage lab with a rack of gizmos and flashing lights will naturally attract the curiosity and attention of kids. So animal experiments have two contexts: What it means to a fully-formed adult, and what it means to the developing personality of a child. The adult and child can walk away from the same experiment with two very different sets of lessons.
The more thorough stories about the Michael Vick scandal occasionally mentioned a side (or central) issue little known by the general public, but well known to police officers and criminal-justice professionals. There's a strong and common correlation between violent acts/crimes against people and an earlier childhood history of abuse of and cruelty to animals.
Children aren't born with empathy toward others; their relationships with and attitudes toward animals play a large role in their later attitudes toward others of their own species. So one big question about zapping live mice and rats is: Are any kids watching? The adult gets nifty images, but what will the kid get?
And the YouTube thing ... the niftier the videos, the more likely they'll generate lots of "try this at home" clones. Thoughtful precautions and restraints you take for granted might not carry over to the 300 clones your videos inspire.
Pro or amateur, I don't think scientists are "better" scientists by desensitizing themselves to the complicated issues regarding the treatment of live animals. And I should be heavily biased toward the fullest range of live animal experiments; a series of intentionally fatal dog experiments from the 1920s keeps me (and millions of other people) alive and healthy year after year. Without the dead dogs, I'd be a dead guy.
But the smartest and best educated among us have a heavy, even disproportionate responsibility for setting and shaping the commonly accepted standards for the whole human community. Arguably, zapping a few live mice and rats does no harm and adds to our scientific knowledge.
But there's another worrisome argument that it desensitizes the community away from our best and most appropriate relationship with all living things, which in turn desensitizes and degrades our relationships with each other.
Bob
Massachusetts USA
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