Animal rights, you're doing it wrong

Recently I've received this sort of email:

TO FACULTY AND STAFF

This notice is to advise you of the upcoming World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week from April 17-April 26, 2010.

We want to remind you to be especially mindful of security during these 10 days. Within the past several years there have been several instances of university research laboratories in California broken into by animal rights extremists. The activists not only destroyed valuable research data, computers and laboratory equipment, but also stole information including researchers’ home addresses, phone numbers and names of spouses. This information was later utilized to send threatening letters, deface personal residences, and instill fear amongst research staff and their families.

Several years ago, we have received several bomb threats directed at animal research labs on campus. This resulted in the evacuation of several campus buildings and ultimately led to the discovery of a fake bomb device and subsequent arrest of those responsible. In addition, a number of attacks at personal residences of some of the faculty and staff have been investigated.

We ask you to follow correct security procedures and measures at all times but especially now – please read and follow these tips:

...etc etc.

One of the things that always bothered me, in terms of logic, is how those people can think that hurting people is okay in order to make a point about hurting animals. I mean, aren't humans, Home sapiens sapiens, a species of animal? Or was there some sort of recent groundbreaking anthropological discovery that I'd completely missed? So how can they justifying hurting one species to make a point about hurting other species? Or does our species get ignored? (Isn't that specie-ist? Which is not a word?) Is it because we have the ability to take care or hurt other species? Are all animal right activists vegetarians? If they are not, does that mean the doing research on chick and fish is okay because they're species that we'd eat? What do those people do when they have pest infestation at their home? Oh wait, that brings me to...

...point B. How some of them really, really need to review the tree of life (I'm going to take a big leap of faith and assume that not all of them are allergic to the concept of evolution). Humans are classified under kingdom Animalia. So are mice, chicken, cows and such, but also fish, flies, lamprey and worms. Do they pick what species they are willing to consider animals based on cuteness? That's unfair. Those animals didn't choose to look the way they do. (Besides, if they could comprehend that "cute" meant they'd probably think the human standards are pretty stupid.) (Just a statement of fact: different species have different criteria on what's attractive. Blue-footed boobies, for instance, view brightly colored foot as the epitome of beauty.)

Finally, the part that always makes me wince: what some of those people try to do to "free" the animals. We hear stories about it after some of the people have been apprehended by the police, and after Finding Nemo I live in horror that some people might think flushing fish down the toilet is an excellent & simple way to set the poor fish free. (It isn't.) Oh and then there are the people who set lab mice free by releasing them in a nearby park or something. On the whole lab animals tend to be very strange and inbred. They are raised in a sterile environment (seriously, my mice are cleaner than I am, considering that I brave the public transit twice a day -- we're all required to gown-up like we're entering the OR to enter our vivarium), they are fed and watered daily and has never had any needs to fend for themselves. A lot of them have traits, not even taking into account the mutant animals, that make them unsuited for living in the wild. (White mice don't blend particular well on anything but snow, and if it's snow then the mice won't make it anyway since they have too much bare skin exposed, they need to be in partial hibernation or something for heat and energy conservation.) My mice get their cages checked for cleanliness twice a week, are fed a diet that's probably more balanced than what most of my classmates eat on a monthly basis, and believe their world is a rectangular box where the wind comes from the dark side of the cage and food and water comes from the sky (the holder is located at the top of the cage). Putting them into the wild is akin to sentencing them to death. Release the chicks? We have coyotes around here. They aren't going to make it very long.

The last line that I should mention is that, given the big hubbub that always happens whenever some medical trial fall through in a bad way and people end up either sick or dead, is it really a good idea to drop out the only link we have between cell culture trials and human trials? Everyone I know who works with animals hates the part where we have to sacrifice the animals, but we do it because it's necessary. For instance, we really do need to know if the animal is getting sicker because a drug has managed to leak across the blood brain barrier into the brain when it's not supposed to, or if the animal's getting sicker just because it's old and old animals tend to develop all kinds of diseases (in mice it goes very similar to the way it goes in humans). And no, we can't wait until the animal's died. First of all, the fact that the animal is sick and we can't cure it (because we don't know what's wrong) means that by letting it live, we are prolonging it's agony. Second of all, diffusion (for a lack of a better word) occurs very rapidly within the body. Depending on the drug, the half life may only be an hour (prolonging half-life is a part of biomed research though), and for some of them, they will only go to certain parts of the body when they're at a critical dosage. The brain starts to decompose the moment the circulation stops. At thirty minutes it's reduced to mush (yeah my dissections are always fun) (yes I'm being sarcastic). There is no system where an animal is monitored 24/7 by people that would allow us to collect an animal the instant its heart stopped beating etc etc. And this is just to list a fairly simple example with very few difficulties.

Seriously, people.