Patisserat
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ahh that’s why my cake icing taste like Black Death
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
It ain’t easy being tapered.
pocong rat
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)
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.
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 ?
Slaughtering animals is standard practice in the meat industry, what’s standard practice gotta do with anything?
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
That’s how the meat industry thrives, for sure. However you can protest against things and also not want to see them uncensored on your feed
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.
Dawg we’re vegan we fucking know, we just don’t want to see this shit uncensored on our feed.
Oh, I am not vegan. I just hate when people try and sanitize their view of the world.
Idk how u can look at that shit and not be vegan but alright
Do you think the people working with livestock are vegan?
I worked with cows (a dairy operation) as a young worker. I like cows, but I also know that they don’t really exist in the wild as we know them.
I don’t think that, no, but I still can’t comprehend what it must be like to live inside a brain that can be so desensitised to this cruelty.
? Its life, its often both wonderful and cruel.
I have a hard time understanding what the inside of a mind that can not engage with reality as it is is like.
I am a big proponent of everyone at some point butchering their own food at least once.
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.
No.
IS IT WORTH IT
Cellular peptide cake is the best
Genetic ooze cake?
With mint frosting.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
i just do what my cat does and pick them up with my mouth. they did not appreciate it at the vet clinic.
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.
Ow lawd, he pipin
rats, rats, we are the rats
Despite all my rage
Despite all my nag*
