When Joe Bellanca (WCAS ’09) needed a way to make money his freshman year, he decided to work in a biology lab that studied the effects of diabetes on the sleep patterns of mice. Bellanca started off cleaning cages, but as time went on, he took on a more “gruesome” responsibility: Killing the mice after the experiments had ended.
“They do follow guidelines that the government sets out for the humane killing of animals, and we would take lab specimens and gas them in some chemical,” he said. “Afterwards, we would break their necks with our hands just to make sure they were dead before we put them in the freezer and incinerated them.”
This procedure, Bellanca said, is simply “normal scientific protocol.” All projects involving animals at NU must be reviewed by the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
Some schools, however, cause their lab animals “severe pain and distress,” said Leah Gomez, project manager of pain and distress for the Humane Society of the United States.
To address this issue, the Humane Society began a national campaign in March 2008 to encourage 600 university presidents to sign a pledge to prevent severe pain and distress in animals used in research.
“We really felt like it was a common sense pledge because the research community is always saying animals experience so little pain and distress,” Gomez said. “Most schools probably aren’t allowing severe pain and distress, which is why we feel like this pledge shouldn’t be a problem.”
Only 37 universities have pledged so far, prompting the society to recently intensify its outreach to students through social media outlets like Facebook. NU’s administration has not yet responded to the pledge, but an online Facebook petition has been signed by 44 NU students.
Cathy DeRose (WCAS ’09) saw the petition in a Facebook advertisement a few weeks ago and was the first person to the sign it.
“I just signed it because I’m really proud of our research, and I’m very against animal cruelty,” DeRose said. “I don’t see why we wouldn’t sign it if other universities have.”
Several universities have declined to sign the pledge because they maintain that university laboratories already follow government rules and regulations. NU, however, has not responded at all.
Government guidelines don’t specifically address “pain and distress in the worst form,” Gomez said, which is why she said it’s still necessary for universities to sign the pledge.
But for Bellanca, using the an “My perspective is if it’s for a good cause like cancer, then I would support killing mice to save a human life,” he said.
imals for medical research could be worth the animals’ suffering.
Communication senior Benjamin Singer, a friend of Bellanca’s, signed the Facebook pledge because he knew about Bellanca’s job freshman year.
“It’s surprising that no one has protested to it since I’ve been at school,” Singer said. “This is a major, major issue that students don’t know enough about.”
Policies set by the IACUC give detailed instructions on how to handle and minimize pain to NU’s lab animals, from anesthetics that should be applied when toe-clipping rodents to guidelines for preventing overcrowding in mouse cages.
Limiting pain and distress to animals is crucial for beneficial medical and scientific research, Gomez said.
“The bottom line is when animals experience pain and distress, that does affect their physiological state, and it can compromise the scientific research,” she said.
However, because NU handles animals in such high quantities, Bellanca said “the university’s hands are tied on this issue.”
“We should protest the use of animals for negative causes, but for medical research, it’s a sad but necessary fact,” he said.
