In the Name of Science
Lab mouse. Photo by viridovipera on Flickr.
In the name of science and with great sadness, we sacrificed an albino lab mice during immunology lab today.
They call it consequentialism - in layman’s terms, the end justifies the mean. With the unfortunate scarification and the subsequent dissection of one mice, our tutor taught twenty odd of us how one is carried out. At least, we didn’t have to kill one each. It would have broken my heart.
And I know, I’m majoring in biological sciences. Breeding, growing, manipulating and killing of animals are something that we cannot avoid and most probably something that our rice bowls will depend on in the future. Animal experimentation with lab mice is not regulated under normal conventions but I am relieved to learn that our tutors, lecturers and lab assistants alike could not place more emphasis on ethical treatment of animals, even under clinical and laboratory settings.
* * *
As we were incubating our mixtures, the tutor ushered us to his table. Sitting on the table beside him was a styrofoam box with four live lab mice inside it, blithely unaware of the terrible fate that awaits them.
We have four concurrent laboratory sessions today, so all of them are going to be sacrificed, a friend noted.
We stood anxiously around the squeaky clean table top draped in a sheet of white paper. Those kind of white you see in hospitals.
The tutor grabbed the pink tail of an unfortunate one, lifting it out of the box. My female classmates cooed at the little being. Look at that adorable little creature! Everyone had a nervous smile on their face - we were all very well aware that its impending doom lies a few moments ahead.
He gave a brief introduction about lab mice and how he felt that gassing them with carbon dioxide, therefore asphyxiating them, is an unethical way. It takes around 30 seconds to a minute for them to suffocate in that mist of invisible, lethal, toxic gas.
We prefer to dislocate their spine. It’s more ethical, and it’s a quick death. No pain, nothing, our tutor remarked matter-of-factly.
So it began. His right hand working on a pair of forceps, he gently but strongly held it against the neck of the quiet invertebrate. It looked up at us quizzically, oblivious to his death sentence.
A quick tug at the tail. No struggle, as I noted. Another two tugs to ensure that death is final. The mouse stopped moving. Murmurs among my classmates rose to horrified, muted wails. No more nervous smiles but faces flushed with green and purple.
I held my clenched palms to my face and let out a silent scream.
With one hand, the tutor pinned each limb with a pink pin. The air was stale with fear and all I saw was bulging eyes on my classmates’ faces. The tutor then picked a surgical scissors out of a basket of tools, and skilfully snipped the skin covering the abdomen and the chest open.
After some more cutting, he took the forceps and started a seemingly endless circuit of pulling organs out, identifying them and telling us what they do in the equivalent human body.
Wrapping the session up, he bundled the dissected body of the mice with great care and brought it out of the laboratory. The rest of us soon gathered around the box, a prison cell holding the remaining three mice, and started cooing at them again.
Today I left the lab with a heavy heart, but I could not shake the fact that we saved another twenty odd mice because our tutor had responsibly chose to do a demonstration instead of a hands-on session.
p/s: Did I mention that the poor little lab mice had their ears snipped off? According to our tutor it was for a certain reason. He didn’t go any further though. RIP, little creature.
