This is a story about three rats. Actually, it’s a story about 25 rats, but only three of them really had a chance at redemption, and even that didn’t happen in the end. I gave them names, even though I never met them, because I couldn’t stand to let them die known only by numbers. They were ordinary hooded rats, three months old. They and their 23 brethren (and of course the other millions of rats we kill yearly) all deserve to be remembered not as objects, but as the clever, curious, sentient beings they were even if they were never treated as such.
This is also a story about three girls in their early 20s; three girls who made very different choices. I wish I could say they were nothing alike, but I think that would be untrue. Different choices aside, they came from similar background, studied similar things, shared many interests. They are all smart in many ways, well educated, personable, close in age. Their names have been changed, even though at this point I don’t really feel like protecting their identities.
One of those three girls is me, and while this particular chapter in my life ended about two weeks ago, I haven’t been able to bring myself to document it in writing yet. Every time I’ve tried, I’ve been gripped by a rage that leaves me shaking and crying, and so instead I’ve immersed myself in family and graduation and the lovely, familiar world of computer languages where there are no ethics or emotion, only classes and logic statements. However, telling their story is all I can do now, and to not do so would be a final act of betrayal for animals who knew pretty much nothing but the cruelty of human animals.
So here goes.
Several months ago, a PhD student in my lab mentioned that she needed to find a home for the rats that she and another of our lab mates couldn’t use in their study on MDMA’s effects on sexual performance in rats. The three of them were ‘non-cooperative’, meaning that they weren’t interested in having sex. They were also drug naive, and they were just sitting, waiting. Of course I said yes (she knew I would) and told her I would pick them up in three days. When I asked her what would happen to the other rats in the study, she said she didn’t know - but she did know they weren’t being vivisected, so she imagined I could take them as well. She was happy I wanted them, she genuinely didn’t want them to be killed. I sympathized - I didn’t want them to die either. So I said I’d find them homes.
I can’t describe how I felt walking out of the lab that day. Despite my continued disgust at the whole notion of animal research, I felt slightly optimistic. For the first time, I really felt that maybe animal researchers weren’t as uncaring towards animals as we tend to characterize them. I feel that we get so few victories, even small ones, and that optimism is sometimes hard to summon. For two days, the thought sustained me as I made fevered efforts to prepare a home for the three naive boys, and contact rescues to place the other 22. The rescues informed me they needed information on the rats, so armed with a list of questions, I entered the lab to start the next step in the process of saving them.
And I hit a brick wall.
When I went to ask the lab mate who first approached me for biographical details to further the adoption process, I didn’t realize that a) she hadn’t asked the primary investigator and that b) the primary investigator would have a HUGE STUPID PROBLEM with me taking any of the rats. Any. Not just the ones that had been injected already, but the naive ones as well. So of course, I just had to ask when she was sitting right there.
Let me make this perfectly clear. I am not stupid. I am well aware of what kind of life some animals used in research and exposed to drugs and chemicals can expect to live. In some cases, euthanasia may be far better than the life these animals can expect to have - and that would make it true euthanasia, not just killing. This was not one of those cases. While MDMA does cause neural changes, its use and side effects in both humans and rats have been well documented and according to my research, these rats could look forward to a period of adjustment (where yes, life would suck) followed by a period of relatively normal life - normal enough to be worth living. The Federal Government has no rules or laws against adopting out animals exposed to MDMA either. Nor did our school, officially, as far as I could tell, although since AU’s IACUC page is password protected (!?) I had to do a lot of investigating to figure it out.
So the primary investigator voiced her ‘opinion’, which was that I should not have any of the rats. At this point, one of our professors walked into the room, and I asked her (she runs an animal lab on campus - she’s also a DVM). Her response was that it was totally fine to take at least the three naive males, if not the 22 others. She even offered to sneak them out for me, one at a time. I should have taken her up on it. Sadly, the PI refused to pull her head out, and so Maria (our professor) offered to go directly to the department chair about it. I agreed, and told her I’d gather resources and go meet with him. I wanted to be as legitimate as possible, and I wanted to save those rats, and I’d have walked barefoot over fire to do so.
So I went to see Tony Riley, the department and IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) chair. It was a difficult visit. He was polite, but extremely patronizing (hello, I’m a senior in your department - if I don’t know that there exists a board that governs animal use, you need to make some changes to the curriculum). His ‘concern’ for the ‘animals’ well being’ frustrated me. He repeatedly stated that it was better for most research animals to die (regardless of their health or potential adoptability) because it was ‘inhumane’ to place them outside of their lab prison. He refused to agree to consider placing official adoption policies in the IACUC guidelines, and brushed off my concerned about the password protection on their web site. In the end, he agreed to let me have the three naive males, and that the IACUC board would vote on the fate of the other 22. However, I had to wait for the next IACUC meeting to get even the three naive rats.
So I waited. Each week, I emailed Tony Riley. Each week, he told me to wait - the next IACUC meeting was at the end of April. I kept in contact with the secondary investigator (the primary investigator was rarely around, something I’ll get to later). I let her know what was going on. She assured me they were still fine, still being feed and cleaned and cared for. Scared and bored and alone, yes, but they had a chance.
During this time (March/April) I began to hear snippits of conversation between the primary and secondary investigators about the goings on in the research room. The two of them seemed to find the happenings pretty funny - the laughed and joked about their rats ‘not wanting to do it’. They even made cute little signs with a rat saying ‘It’s sexy time!’. They began to prep their syringes in our lab, and one day I overheard the secondary investigator asking (practically begging) the primary to please, do the injections. ‘They squeal when I do it’, she said, ‘I know I’m hurting them, I’m not very good at it’. The PI told her to just hold them more firmly.
I couldn’t believe it. I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to anger them and make them do something to the rats, but I quit spending time in the lab. When I was there, I weaseled information out of them - why was they doing this, what was the question they wanted to answer? The secondary didn’t know, and the primary’s answer main answer? Publication.
Then the primary investigator went missing. She told us she was in the hospital because her blood work had come back strange. In her place, the secondary investigator was left to carry on alone. I heard her talking to a friend of the PI’s who was supposed to be helping her one day, and heard him tell her he ‘didn’t really have time to help out with someone else’s half cocked, poorly planned mess of a study’. I was even more shocked. She seemed stuck between a rock and hard place - between conscience and desire for scholarly acclaim, but the study soldiered on. I waited patiently on the IACUC, assured that whatever happened, we would get some rats legitimately, and sneak out others. I kept a low profile, even when I felt like throwing up or kicking them and running.
Then finals happened. I hadn’t been in the lab in almost a week when I wandered in on the last Tuesday in April. No sooner had I sat down at a computer then the primary investigator and the secondary investigator walked in. ‘We’re done with the rats’, announced the PI, and I felt my stomach lurch. ‘What?’ I thought… ‘I must have heard her wrong’, but by the time I got out, they were gone.
The approval from the IACUC came that morning. I didn’t find out until the next day, at a lunch for graduating seniors. The department chair shook my hand and told me the adoption had been approved. I told him I thought they were already dead. He said, ‘Oh, that’s okay, we’ll find you some more’.
I emailed the secondary investigator as soon as I heard about the IACUC decision, and again three days later. I didn’t hear anything until that weekend when I got an email back apologizing, but letting me know that they had indeed been ‘put down’ because the primary investigator was ‘adamant about it’ and ‘made her believe that the IACUC had said no’. I didn’t see the secondary investigator again until that Monday, when she proctored one of my finals. When I finished my final and left, she came outside to talk to me, and told me the whole story. Apparently the primary investigator hadn’t been in the hospital for the past two weeks - she has been in a mental health ward, and she wasn’t allowed to leave. She had also told the secondary investigator that the IACUC had not approved it, and that ‘euthanasia’ was their only option. She refused to allow anyone to take even one of the rats, and refused to have anyone notified. And then the secondary told me that the manner in which the rats were destroyed was ‘horrific.’ ‘I’ll spare you the details’, she said, ‘but it’s never something I want to see again. It wasn’t what I was led to believe would happen’. I thanked her for trying, and I left.
When I look back on the series of events, I wonder how I could have been stupid and cowardly enough not to do more - how I even could have trusted that a system where animals are completely dispensable to offer even a modicum of protection or salvation? How could I have trusted anyone who was willing to experiment on animals to feel strongly enough about them not to let them be killed completely needlessly? I feel like I failed not only the rats I couldn’t save, but my own ethics and morals by not being more verbal, more vehement. I was scared; scared that I would alienate the people at the department who I thought I needed, scared that if I spoke up, retaliation would come in the form of the deaths of all 25 rats. In the end, I guess it didn’t matter. I failed them just as thoroughly as I would have if I had railed against the department publicly.
Even now, two weeks later, I still feel as guilty as any vivisector. I should have saved them.
A lot of people in the animal rights movement still deny the logic of direct action, and would never consider taking part. They feel like they should do what they can through legitimate means wherever possible. Before this, that’s exactly how I felt. Now, I can understand exactly what spirit grips those who do what they know to be right, no matter what the costs. In many cases, we cannot trust ‘legitimate means’ when the very system they rest on is so biased against animals. What happens when legitimacy is at the mercy of one person’s bad attitude or psychotic whims? What happens when the whole system is set up to take the blame away from those who don’t follow the rules in place for ‘the animals’ protection’ and allow them to simply walk away, degree in hand? This study allowed an untrained, uncomfortable secondary investigator to administer medical care to sentient beings. It allowed a 22 year old girl with no veterinary degree to spay a dozen female rats, one of whom died on the table. It allowed her to ignore best practices and instead use convenience to determine the method of 24 individual’s demises.
The timing of their deaths is curious to me still. How could it have been so perfect, that they were killed immediately after the IACUC approved their adoption? Why was the primary investigator so insistent? Why didn’t the department chair contact them right away? Why did he make me wait so long for approval (the IACUC meets at the end of every month, which means he must have had two)? Why is the IACUC web site with the guidelines and rules password protected? For that matter, why would a university supposedly focused on the three R’s approved a study like this anyway? So many questions that are unanswerable by anyone. So few people who care.
When the secondary investigator told me what happened the night after my final, she expressed her disgust with the whole process, and especially with the primary investigator. She told me she was sorry, so sorry, and that she hoped I could understand and that we could still be friends. And I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to someone who was unable to stand up for animals she obviously believed deserved to live? And then I realized she’s not so unlike me. Perhaps her involvement in their deaths was more direct than mine, but still, I could have done more. She cared enough to say something, to try, unlike so many, many others, even if she didn’t recognize her actions in performing the research as wrong. She wasn’t strong enough to stop it, but neither was I. So I said yes, we can. And then I walked away before she could see me cry.
In loving memory of Vincent, Henri, Remy, and the other millions rats ’sacrificed’ each year in tests and research. The exact number used each year is unknown because the government does not require labs to keep track of the numbers of rodents used.
All photos taken from Flickr.com under CCR.
