Animal Research Ethics Case Studies

The words in the title are a Google search term which is why I chose it. I can provide a case study (in the singular). The study shows how unethical animal research can be. In fact its very existence is unethical as far as I am concerned.

I want to refer to a company called Liberty Research, Inc.. They operate out of a non-descript building in central New York. They work for companies such as Bayer, Zoetis and Merck.

The well-known animal rights organisation, PETA, has eyewitness accounts of the cruelty meted out to cats and dogs within this windowless abomination of a building. They say that cats and dogs are held in miserable, barren conditions. Some horrible things take place there. Can you believe that dogs had holes drilled into their heads and a virus injected into the hole? Cats apparently suffocated under flipped-over litter boxes.

Cats were locked away in crowded rooms and grew thin because they were unable to compete for an adequate amount of food while other cats with injuries were given a single dose of pain relief “at best”. And when it was time to euthanise an animal they did so in a horribly botched way.

So if you want a case study regarding the ethics of animal testing you can use this one to support the unethical and unjustifiable cruelty of animal testing laboratories.

Here is some more detail. Liberty uses hundreds of dogs and cats annually for testing. A lot of the tests are for veterinary drugs ironically. The company also breeds and sells thousands of cats and dogs to be used in experiments at places such as the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the US Department of Agriculture.

The businesses and organisations which contract with Liberty have the opportunity to see the substandard conditions and the distress in the animals so they are party to this animal cruelty. They are willing participants and accomplices.

As for the dogs who had their brains drilled into, they were anaesthetised but not adequately so some of them blinked and whimpered during the procedure. When they woke up they were moaning. Some of the dogs hit their heads on cage walls. Blood spurted from their wounds. The dogs were left to suffer after the tortuous treatment. Some dogs foamed at the mouth and others had seizures. Eventually they were put down.

PETA say that the experiment was scientifically pointless. One reason for this is that dogs are infected with the distemper virus through inhalation not to the brain (the experiment concerned the distemper virus). There is also a vaccine for distemper. They say that any data obtained from this experiment would be useless.

Regarding cats, they say that they were kept in “barren, windowless pens in unnatural conditions.” The pens were crowded to the point where they looked as if this was a case of cat hoarding. Some of the cats were very thin because there unable to get enough food. Little concern was shown for their well-being.

Regarding a breeding female cat a supervisor said:

“There’s never any break for her… There are a lot of problems with them [giving birth] because they’re underweight, but it’s masked because they’re pregnant, and then they go downhill while they’re nursing because they can’t keep up with the demand.”

We can refer to an individual cat named Jade(see photo above). He had seizures for almost a month. They left him briefly paralysed. He dragged himself along with his front legs. Nothing was done to help him and improve his welfare. When it came to put down Jade it was slow and painful. One worker tried to sedate him while he struggled in another worker’s arms. He stumbled and fell to the floor amongst other cats. A worker gave him a lethal injection in the heart. When the needle was inserted his head jerked. This indicates she might have been conscious and experiencing pain.

One worker admitted that she had injected animals in the heart even though she believed that they were not fully sedated. She admitted:

“I’ve had them where [their upper bodies were] lifting up and I was still able to kill them this way”.

PETA say that Liberty performs archaic experiments which are cruel despite the fact that there are alternative methods which do not require animals in laboratories. In one experiment that Liberty carried out for a pharmaceutical company, young dogs were injected with high doses of an opioid. They were subjected to multiple blood draws. The dogs became lethargic and depressed. They refused to eat. They were made to suffer. This despite the fact that microdosing, computational methods and cell-based methods could have been used instead.

It seems that the workers at these sorts of places become inured to the idea of compassion and sensitivity. An example concerns a cat named Neville who was kept caged with other cats. The other cats attacked him. His nose was lacerated and scabby for five months. When asked if the laceration should be reported the worker replied that it just from fighting and therefore she implied that nothing should be done. Another cat suffered from a claw being inserted right through his/her cornea. There must have been extremely painful. There were no records of pain relief being given to this cat.

Liberty use tattoos to identify cats rather than microchips because it’s cheaper. Tattooing is a painful procedure. Another example of saving money is when this company used the same animals in test after test. PETA say that the company failed to understand the long-term effects of the experimental compounds and possible interactions with other medications. They say when animals are recycled in this way it could introduce “confounding factors”. This further calls into question the value of the experiment’s results.

My comment: This case study on this page is awful. But I am not surprised. The problem of animal testing is much wider than maltreatment of animals at animal testing labs. Many people would agree that the concept of using animals this way is flawed. We have no right to do it. We don’t have the right to make animals suffer like this for our benefit (often not incidentally). We should be concerned about the welfare of animals not how to abuse and use them.

Source page. Thanks.