I was reading this article in New Scientist (do I read anything else anymore? Those things come so fast in the mail…I’m halfway through one and the next one arrives) on research done with monkeys. And I’m an animal rights supporter. I don’t think animals should be mistreated, experimented on unnecessarily, tortured, maimed, hunted for sport, etc., etc. But I’m also a huge proponent of research and testing and making new discoveries. It isn’t even really a question — given the option of testing new drugs or procedures on animal or human subjects, no one is going to say, let’s test experimental drugs on humans. No one.
You should’ve seen this photo in the magazine. This sad, little monkey sitting in the corner. For a moment, I become really emotional about the animal imagining what it must undergo. But I completely anthropomorphize, too. Because that monkey isn’t necessarily sad. I project those emotions onto him. The editor chose that photo for that layout specifically for that effect. That isn’t to say that I don’t think monkeys and other animals don’t suffer some sort of trauma when they undergo tests and drug trials and various invasive and non-invasive procedures. I’m sure they do.
The quandry, I think, is balancing the needs of research against being as humane as possible. How do we ensure that we have enough resources to conduct all the research we need in order to progress in our scientific endeavors, and still treat animals humanely by decreasing stress, minimizing physical pain, and limiting use in trials. As a concrete example, we can talk about re-use of monkeys in research. Primates are currently in short supply. Often they are re-used in multiple experiments. From a humanitarian point of view, we want to limit the amount of suffering it undergoes by using it for one trial/one experiment, but from the same point of view, we want to limit the number of monkeys and apes being used for experiments. Where do we draw the line between those two? Do we experiment again and again with the same resource? Or bring in new resources? And at what point we bring in new resources? After one trial? Two, three? Four if they’re minor, two if the experiments are particularly harrowing?
Whatever the balance, it sounds like there should be something done to change the current situation — not only so that we can keep on conducting these trials, but also so that we can learn as much as possible out of the trials we do. There is a bad shortage of primates available and attainable for experimentation. AIDS research, for example, isn’t moving as fast it could. The Indian rhesus monkey is virtually unavailable, but critical in AIDS research because these Indian origin monkeys develop AIDS from SIV as humans do from HIV.
More data should be gathered on primates while in experimentation — history of the primate (what other trials, if any, has it been a part of? where did it come from?), gender, health, daily living arrangements (do they get exercise? have room to move around? live in a tiny cage?). These things are just as important when evaluating the data from experimentation — these can have an impact on that data, yet it’s not kept track of or published. If a monkey is stressed out from having been transported halfway around the world from a breeder to a lab, surely his immune system is suppressed, his biochemical balance is slightly altered — these things affect one’s reaction to a drug or ability to heal. It isn’t trivial. How can you ignore it?
