[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by AKA_Monet

It's the sheer number of them... I hit my limit. After a passive method, and so many of them, I am needing something stronger than 2 hard alcoholic beverages... Something like Vici or a percoset...

As you move up in your field, and review possibly "Lab Animal Medicine", you will find that the duty of the vet is to ensure optimal care of all "research animals". What you find is most folks are clueless as to how to plan for experiments with animal models. They basically breed several cages together, thereby generating 100's of animals that go unused. And because animal costs are high, we wind up euthanizing them...

My personally thoughts are every animal generated needs to be used in research protocols--or most of them. And because we take US Taxpayer funds to finance this research, then it behooves us to make the most of these animal models completely... Well, that is not happening at my institution. Dare I say most of them.

So 100's or 1000's of unusable animal models are resigned to a dubious fate...

Just thinking about it will cause me nightmares... This is outside my character... And if I stay on it, I will get pissed.

AKA_Monet this is very interesting. I don't know why this hasn't been discussed before on this thread. I agree with you though. Me personally, I think there needs to be something in place to develop non animal alternatives to the use of animals in research and education. I mean just to kill animals because they're not being used for experiments is not right at all. I think fewer animals can be used to obtain the same amount data or allow more information to be obtained from a given number of animals. I think this would decrease the total number of animals that have to be used. I also think that refinement alternatives would be nice too, because it would lessen animals pain and distress. I mean, think about it. If more refinement alternatives are developed, I think it's appropriate to assume that if a procedure is painful to humans, it will also be painful to animals. Anesthetics and/or analgesics could be used to alleviate any potential pain. That's sad to just euthanize them just because they're not going to be used. I see why it makes you upset. I think this is great topic though.