This pic looks like the same from a post people talked about how this is used to transport lab rats around a lab, that it cam be comforting to them, comfy confinment or something. tldr the rat is safe (for a likely lab rat) and this is humane treatment.
Not really. It causes them stress. “Safe” and “Humane” are variable. But it definitely isn’t the “best” restraint method.
lifting and holding by the tail, and handling using a soft plastic restraint cone, resulted in significant increases in mean arterial pressure and heart rate compared with baseline.3 The authors concluded that being lifted in a restraint cone appeared to be the most disturbing handling method for the rats, followed by the tail method, as determined by prolonged duration of increased cardiovascular parameters as compared with the encircling or scruffing methods.3
Noted, thank you...now I need to read these papers to learn the actual "best" method of restraint...even though ive never really seen a mouse in my life and likely never will need to restrain them.
For mice it’s tunnel handling, where you just let them walk into a tube and pick that up. You do need to scruff them to hold them for actual procedures and to examine their teeth and stuff, but it’s really stressful for them to be snatched out of their home by the tail.
For rats it’s just picking them up with your hand over their back and under the armpits and then support the bum with your other hand like you would a kitten or any other small domestic critter. Rats are generally more calm and don’t mind being picked up, mice don’t love it and will jump or run away or bite.
I think that really depends on the individual, some rats are skittish and don't like being handled at all. The best way to handle them is to leave them alone.
Humans should test their shit on themselves or on some other human that they can explain the risks to and agree compensation.
Humans should test their shit on themselves or on some other human that they can explain the risks to and agree compensation
And medical research would grind to a halt. As unfortunate of relying on these creatures is, their fast growth, short lived, and rapid reproduction cycle makes them perfect for all kinds of research.
The rat is safe in that it can't hurt itself or others, but they feel the same about this kind of confinement as humans do. I guess whether that counts as humane is a matter of opinion.
I’m sure some of it is worthwhile. But knowing a couple applied researchers who work in animal labs, according to them a large amount of what is done is absolutely useless and only serves to get out a new useless product TM or publish a paper that looks good.
For those who don’t know, this is how some labs use rats and mice when the are uncooperative. I don’t think the intent is to hurt the mouse, just to contain it briefly.
Not saying it’s okay or not okay. Just saying why it’s like this.
Best solution would be to not use antiquated systems for testing for human consumption, a method that isn't even that indicative of how it would react to a human anyway.
You will never get human trials for anything that hasn't passed animal testing until we have lab grown human organs/organ systems, but that is a ways out and also somewhat controversial. Coning partial people or parts of people needs a lot of safeguards.
Curious if you’re thinking of any cases where we’d need a safeguard for any parts of the body other than the brain? Like would a whole human minus the brain be OK?
I guess there’s the whole identity theft and impersonation side of things.
Exactly what I am talking about along with the immortalized cell lines stolen from minorities. I have no problems with people donating themselves to science or being appropriately compensated with thoroughly informed consent, the advances to science are critical. I just don't want the biomedical equivalent of OpenAI stealing IP happening to make the 0.1% even richer.
Yeah but can you give more details? Like what’s an example of something bad happening if it’s more than individual organs, like your entire body minus your head for example.
Like Henrietta Lacks, who I mention in another reply, who had her cells harvested from a cervical cancer treatment and propagated indefinitely to be used as human medical specimens. Pharmaceutical companies have already attempted patenting portions of the human genome, so having them take sections of your personal genome if you have an allele mutation they find profitable is a concern. Using your genetic code like an advertising fingerprint to sell you treatments or services. Selling that data to third parties. Making registries of people with specific genetics for use by Governments to regulate or oppress, either eugenically or ethnically.
There are multiple movies where instead of growing individual organs they clone people for harvest, which I would hope is just too far beyond the pale to ever leave Hollywood but, then I remember shit like Unit 731 and Josef Mengele. That last one isn't really a real fear, but had to mention it.
Rats are cool for testing cancer. You feel a lump the size of a pea in the morning, call the vet, and by the time you have an appointment in the evening it’s grown to the size of a pecan.
yeah! animal testing only exists to cause harm! outcomes are irrelevant - science gets off on beating up animals and THATS why animal testing exists… those sadistic pricks
I didn't say it's useless, but people do enjoy beating the shit out of animals. And also some research about vulnerable minorities gets screwed over because of animal testing example: autistic mice: lead and microplastic poisoning the mice and observing their behaviour. If we fed mice a shitload of fried chicken and called them N mice, the media would be mad as shit, but of course it's completely fine when it's not a recognized minority.
The fucked up part are the experiments, not the euthanasia.
Rats have to be killed because we don't know if they will continue to suffer after the painful experiments done on them. They can't be let out either because it can harm the general rat population. Companies don't give enough of a shit about keeping rats alive in rat retirement homes either.
which is doubly so sad because rats don't even live that long :( if an experiment lasts 1,5 years an average rat will only live for 6 more months. a rat retirement home wouldn't even be a big commitment
but also like, it's kinda nice to not do cancer research on humans, for all that animal testing sucks human testing is almost universally viewed as 1000x worse and doing no testing at all is also unacceptable because that means we don't decrease the amount of humans who suffer terrible diseases and deaths (which for reference can be you or people you love).
Yes, rat experimentation is the cornerstone of modern medicone, but that doesn't make it any less fucked up.
Something can be equally good for people yet completely inhumane. It doesn't cancel each other out.
Do I think we should stop experimenting on rats? Absolutely not. But we can try to at least improve the general well-being of these rats and stop deliberately torture them. Peopes have done sleep deprivation experiments where a rat is forced to stay awake or fall in the water and start to drown.
In my country, for a vet to pass classes, they need to put a rat in anesthesia. Those rats are all the same weight and age. I’ve adopted 3 once. They’re amazing pets but only live for up to 3 years
Its probably not a good way to transport them because that looks very stressful but it probably keeps them warm so it might be better than a metal cage.
I am going to hypothesize here: depends on how long rat's in the tube.
I'm imagining a scenario where a vet has to X-ray a pet rat. Rat goes in the tube for 5 minutes while images are taken and then Rat can come back out of the tube. Rat's probably going to be okay. A treat may be in order.
If he had to stay in there for a month, I don't think he'll ever be a normal rat again.
Computational biochemistry is slowly getting there. Alphafold was a big breakthrough, and there is plenty of ongoing research simulating more and more.
We can probably never get rid of animal testing entirely for clinical research, we’ll always need to validate simulations in animals before moving on to humans.
I do however agree that animal testing outside of clinical research approved by a competent independent ethics committee can fuck right off. (Looking at you, cosmetics industry)
We can probably never get rid of animal testing entirely for clinical research, we’ll always need to validate simulations in animals before moving on to humans.
Getting rid of animal testing is the exact purpose of organ-on-a-chip research! This is actual bioengineered cultures, not simulations (not dissing on computational biochemistry - also extremely important)
If you can test without the full animal, then models (in this context, models = what you use for testing, be it cultures or animals) based on human induced pluropotent stem cells (ie cells taken from live, adult humans and forced to revert to a stem cell status) in an in vitro setting can actually be more relevant to human physiology than live animal models.
There are a lot of caveats (if it were easy, it would already be done), and there are barriers needed to be overcome for in vitro models to even come close to in vivo and ex vivo models. But a lot of people are investing in it, not (only) due to ethics but also due to lower model cost and better match of in vitro results with the actual effect on a live human body.
I can give papers when I get home, if you want.
Edit: I went on a deep dive on medical applications: suffice it to say, this is useless for behavioral experiments
Yeah. Fuck those scientists. Especially the ones that have created life saving things like penicilling, insuling. And its so shitty they used lab rats to test useless things like covid vaccines lately. I mean why to use poor rats. They could just have tested the vaccines with poor people.
And fuck cancer treatment too. Lets just treat people blindly, they are going to die anyway, why not make their last moments suffering just because you like mouses. Maybe we just should stop trying to cure cancer.
It's been put forth that we should have other kinds of censor tags on Lemmy, but NSFW is currently the only one supported. It's been used here and on other sites for disturbing imagery of murders, spiders for arachnophobes, etc. Even without that, a text tag of [animal abuse] facilitates the use of client-side content filters.
Right or wrong on whether this qualifies (I don't think it does, personally, especially compared to what else happens to lab rats) you're disagreeing on whether it counts and using dishonest rhetoric to try and reframe the dispute.
No.
IS IT WORTH IT
Cellular peptide cake is the best
With mint frosting.
Genetic ooze cake?
https://youtu.be/ucbO7NEy1-Q
This isn’t baking class 🥺
It can be, you just need to squeeze harder.
Worst icing ever
Noooooo. Poor rattie :(
They generally don't mind this
I'd like to see their survey results
Had pet rats for a couple of years. You can tell when they're unhappy.
This pic looks like the same from a post people talked about how this is used to transport lab rats around a lab, that it cam be comforting to them, comfy confinment or something. tldr the rat is safe (for a likely lab rat) and this is humane treatment.
Not really. It causes them stress. “Safe” and “Humane” are variable. But it definitely isn’t the “best” restraint method.
As for example explored by this paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10844733/
Noted, thank you...now I need to read these papers to learn the actual "best" method of restraint...even though ive never really seen a mouse in my life and likely never will need to restrain them.
For mice it’s tunnel handling, where you just let them walk into a tube and pick that up. You do need to scruff them to hold them for actual procedures and to examine their teeth and stuff, but it’s really stressful for them to be snatched out of their home by the tail.
For rats it’s just picking them up with your hand over their back and under the armpits and then support the bum with your other hand like you would a kitten or any other small domestic critter. Rats are generally more calm and don’t mind being picked up, mice don’t love it and will jump or run away or bite.
i just do what my cat does and pick them up with my mouth. they did not appreciate it at the vet clinic.
I think that really depends on the individual, some rats are skittish and don't like being handled at all. The best way to handle them is to leave them alone.
Humans should test their shit on themselves or on some other human that they can explain the risks to and agree compensation.
And medical research would grind to a halt. As unfortunate of relying on these creatures is, their fast growth, short lived, and rapid reproduction cycle makes them perfect for all kinds of research.
The rat is safe in that it can't hurt itself or others, but they feel the same about this kind of confinement as humans do. I guess whether that counts as humane is a matter of opinion.
Unfortunately this is rather tame compared to the fucked up shit we put cute little ratties through in the name of science.
I know… :(.
I’m sure some of it is worthwhile. But knowing a couple applied researchers who work in animal labs, according to them a large amount of what is done is absolutely useless and only serves to get out a new useless product TM or publish a paper that looks good.
rats, rats, we are the rats
Ow lawd, he pipin
For those who don’t know, this is how some labs use rats and mice when the are uncooperative. I don’t think the intent is to hurt the mouse, just to contain it briefly.
Not saying it’s okay or not okay. Just saying why it’s like this.
I’ve seen a vet do this to a rat at the vet who was very much only interested in climbing
it definitely doesn't hurt the mouse, maybe they're a bit uncomfortable but it's just all-round the best solution for everyone involved
Uncomfortable?!! No. I’ve had plenty of those serotonin potatoes as pets and they love tight spaces. A Sputnik-House is made for 2-3 rats.
Well, 7 can fit in there, the 8th just had the head in there.
Best solution would be to not use antiquated systems for testing for human consumption, a method that isn't even that indicative of how it would react to a human anyway.
You will never get human trials for anything that hasn't passed animal testing until we have lab grown human organs/organ systems, but that is a ways out and also somewhat controversial. Coning partial people or parts of people needs a lot of safeguards.
Curious if you’re thinking of any cases where we’d need a safeguard for any parts of the body other than the brain? Like would a whole human minus the brain be OK?
I guess there’s the whole identity theft and impersonation side of things.
The main concerns I see are if it is actually only individual organs, and things like your rights to your own genetic code/cell lines.
I could easily see some corporation buying someone's intellectual property rights to their genetic code. I do recall a Supreme Court case where a company patented DNA.
Exactly what I am talking about along with the immortalized cell lines stolen from minorities. I have no problems with people donating themselves to science or being appropriately compensated with thoroughly informed consent, the advances to science are critical. I just don't want the biomedical equivalent of OpenAI stealing IP happening to make the 0.1% even richer.
Yeah but can you give more details? Like what’s an example of something bad happening if it’s more than individual organs, like your entire body minus your head for example.
Like Henrietta Lacks, who I mention in another reply, who had her cells harvested from a cervical cancer treatment and propagated indefinitely to be used as human medical specimens. Pharmaceutical companies have already attempted patenting portions of the human genome, so having them take sections of your personal genome if you have an allele mutation they find profitable is a concern. Using your genetic code like an advertising fingerprint to sell you treatments or services. Selling that data to third parties. Making registries of people with specific genetics for use by Governments to regulate or oppress, either eugenically or ethnically.
There are multiple movies where instead of growing individual organs they clone people for harvest, which I would hope is just too far beyond the pale to ever leave Hollywood but, then I remember shit like Unit 731 and Josef Mengele. That last one isn't really a real fear, but had to mention it.
Rats are cool for testing cancer. You feel a lump the size of a pea in the morning, call the vet, and by the time you have an appointment in the evening it’s grown to the size of a pecan.
And they probably grab the rat by the taip and beat the shit out of it.
yeah! animal testing only exists to cause harm! outcomes are irrelevant - science gets off on beating up animals and THATS why animal testing exists… those sadistic pricks
I didn't say it's useless, but people do enjoy beating the shit out of animals. And also some research about vulnerable minorities gets screwed over because of animal testing example: autistic mice: lead and microplastic poisoning the mice and observing their behaviour. If we fed mice a shitload of fried chicken and called them N mice, the media would be mad as shit, but of course it's completely fine when it's not a recognized minority.
Despite all my rage
This image fills my heart with dread :[
This reminds me of when a lab technician explained to me what happens to all the mice at the end of the experiment. 😭
The fucked up part are the experiments, not the euthanasia.
Rats have to be killed because we don't know if they will continue to suffer after the painful experiments done on them. They can't be let out either because it can harm the general rat population. Companies don't give enough of a shit about keeping rats alive in rat retirement homes either.
which is doubly so sad because rats don't even live that long :( if an experiment lasts 1,5 years an average rat will only live for 6 more months. a rat retirement home wouldn't even be a big commitment
but also like, it's kinda nice to not do cancer research on humans, for all that animal testing sucks human testing is almost universally viewed as 1000x worse and doing no testing at all is also unacceptable because that means we don't decrease the amount of humans who suffer terrible diseases and deaths (which for reference can be you or people you love).
Yes, rat experimentation is the cornerstone of modern medicone, but that doesn't make it any less fucked up.
Something can be equally good for people yet completely inhumane. It doesn't cancel each other out.
Do I think we should stop experimenting on rats? Absolutely not. But we can try to at least improve the general well-being of these rats and stop deliberately torture them. Peopes have done sleep deprivation experiments where a rat is forced to stay awake or fall in the water and start to drown.
In my country, for a vet to pass classes, they need to put a rat in anesthesia. Those rats are all the same weight and age. I’ve adopted 3 once. They’re amazing pets but only live for up to 3 years
Patisserat
Ahh that's why my cake icing taste like Black Death
https://media1.tenor.com/m/VwqeWbaSRMUAAAAC/filling-pastry.gif
Shame whoever took this
This is how we treat rats in the lab. Sorry if you buy any products tested on animals.
Fuck animal testing
I hardly believe there aren't other ways to manage animal research
Piping hot rat.
Its probably not a good way to transport them because that looks very stressful but it probably keeps them warm so it might be better than a metal cage.
It’s a decapi-cone… for euthanasia (sorry)
Can also be used for blood collection tho
I'm not going to yuck Remmy's yum.
pocong rat
It ain't easy being tapered.
Does anyone remember bonsai-kitty?
Apply directly to the cake
Does this hurt the rat?
The action of putting them in the tube doesn't. However, this is a rat used for testing of some kind so it will be hurt at some point
Maybe it’s in the control group
Eventually yes
I am going to hypothesize here: depends on how long rat's in the tube.
I'm imagining a scenario where a vet has to X-ray a pet rat. Rat goes in the tube for 5 minutes while images are taken and then Rat can come back out of the tube. Rat's probably going to be okay. A treat may be in order.
If he had to stay in there for a month, I don't think he'll ever be a normal rat again.
Fuck all animal testing and every scientist participating in it.
Computational biochemistry is slowly getting there. Alphafold was a big breakthrough, and there is plenty of ongoing research simulating more and more.
We can probably never get rid of animal testing entirely for clinical research, we’ll always need to validate simulations in animals before moving on to humans.
I do however agree that animal testing outside of clinical research approved by a competent independent ethics committee can fuck right off. (Looking at you, cosmetics industry)
Getting rid of animal testing is the exact purpose of organ-on-a-chip research! This is actual bioengineered cultures, not simulations (not dissing on computational biochemistry - also extremely important)
If you can test without the full animal, then models (in this context, models = what you use for testing, be it cultures or animals) based on human induced pluropotent stem cells (ie cells taken from live, adult humans and forced to revert to a stem cell status) in an in vitro setting can actually be more relevant to human physiology than live animal models.
There are a lot of caveats (if it were easy, it would already be done), and there are barriers needed to be overcome for in vitro models to even come close to in vivo and ex vivo models. But a lot of people are investing in it, not (only) due to ethics but also due to lower model cost and better match of in vitro results with the actual effect on a live human body.
I can give papers when I get home, if you want.
Edit: I went on a deep dive on medical applications: suffice it to say, this is useless for behavioral experiments
Yeah. Fuck those scientists. Especially the ones that have created life saving things like penicilling, insuling. And its so shitty they used lab rats to test useless things like covid vaccines lately. I mean why to use poor rats. They could just have tested the vaccines with poor people.
And fuck cancer treatment too. Lets just treat people blindly, they are going to die anyway, why not make their last moments suffering just because you like mouses. Maybe we just should stop trying to cure cancer.
What's wrong with thalidomide? We can just put the shelves lower!
Can images of animal abuse please be labeled as such and get a NSFW blur please?
Isn't this standard practice ?
What part of them is unsafe for work?
It's been put forth that we should have other kinds of censor tags on Lemmy, but NSFW is currently the only one supported. It's been used here and on other sites for disturbing imagery of murders, spiders for arachnophobes, etc. Even without that, a text tag of [animal abuse] facilitates the use of client-side content filters.
Even so, still not NSFW. Wondering "It's tagged NSFW but is it actually NSFW?" creates its own predicaments & nuisances.
Better not to misappropriate tags that serve a definite function.
They didn't say it's NSFW, just that they'd appreciate the blur. Not everyone wants to look at such things randomly.
NSFW means NSFW, though, and not "my personal appreciation filter".
No, you're right. It would be just nice to use filters for potentially triggering content.
Animal abuse is both.
Right or wrong on whether this qualifies (I don't think it does, personally, especially compared to what else happens to lab rats) you're disagreeing on whether it counts and using dishonest rhetoric to try and reframe the dispute.
Dishonest rhetoric? You're speaking of yourself by twisting NSFW. Words mean things, not whatever you want them to mean.
An image of a rat in an open piping bag doesn't ordinarily result in disciplinary action at work.
And you don't know what that meaning is. Bye forever, coomer.
Out of sight, out of mind
Do I need to look at images of dead Palestinian kids too? Does wanting to go about my day in a measure of peace mean I don't really care?
Putting your head in the sand is not a good way to engage with the world.
This is what your beef comes from, for example. (from wikipidia fyi)
Ether accept that like nature itself we are often monstrous, or do something about it (and be laughed at most likely).
I'm literally eating vegan nuggets right now, but thanks for being an ass.
Pls put the image in a spoiler tag to stop the barrage of reports. 🙏
That is my very point. It is not censored in wikipedia (and it should not be), why would it need that here?
If you want to ban me over it please do, but I don't think science (memes or otherwise) and censorship are compatible.
Nah, fam. I let people have opinions, but I have to remove it. I asked nicely. It's about common courtesy, not ideology.
Fair enough, I think my point stands well with the removal. Mind if I link to the wiki article on slaughterhouses (since there will be no image)?
That's fine. I don't mind that, I'll restore your comment if you agree to switch.
Sounds like a plan. I will change the image to a hyperlink.