The newly unveiled “interactive lab animal microsurgery education center” at the National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs) doesn’t mark progress — it punctuates depravity.
Touted as a “first-of-its-kind” facility that promises to improve the “post-surgery survival rate for lab animals”, this center doesn’t solve a problem. Rather, it confesses to one: animals are being routinely butchered in labs across the world by people with no competence, surgical training, and no oversight.
This isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.
Because here’s the horrifying truth: “virtually any procedure can be performed on any experimental animal”, and it can be performed by virtually anyone.
Researchers routinely try to “simulate illness and diseases” in nonhuman animals without knowing what they’re doing – and without anyone watching. Imagine, as is often the case, “[o]ne graduate student . . . simultaneously serv[ing] as [an] anesthetist, scrub nurse, surgeon, and recovery room nurse.”
Picture self-trained research faculty modeling their methods for stabbing, cutting, burning, and killing sentient beings – before unleashing undergrads to recreate the horrors themselves.
Then, try to feel surprised that animals fall victim to unintended death, disfigurement, and unrelenting pain. Indeed, student microsurgeries – delicate procedures performed under microscopes – result in “a large number of lab animal deaths, with a survival rate below 80 percent”.
Yet, instead of viewing this as a crisis, the animal research industry shrugs it off as acceptable collateral damage. Because this industry doesn’t punish incompetence and barbarity – it institutionalizes it.
As a career animal research veterinarian explains, “few formal rules govern which individuals can perform different experimental procedures on animals” and – almost unbelievably – “[m]uch of research animal surgery is performed by technicians, undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty scientists . . . with little or no training or oversight from veterinarians.” It is not even required that a veterinarian be present during a surgery.
The results are predictable – and endless:
- Animals dying after being subject to unapproved and botched surgeries that result in open and infected wounds, sepsis, blindness, intestinal torsion, and stomach perforation.
- Animals being operated on while not fully anesthetized.
- Researchers not using sterile techniques and not wearing appropriate PPE.
- Researchers using dirty instruments, reusing needles, and watching Zoom meetings and messing on their phones while performing surgeries.
And, it’s not just surgeries. Researchers regularly kill animals through the failed performance of even basic procedures:
- By “ripp[ing]” their jugular veins and causing blood clots when trying to insert catheters.
- By tearing their esophaguses with improperly gauged needles shoved down their throats.
- By bungling blood draws – causing them to bleed to death from femoral artery damage, causing severe damage to their eyes from botched retro-orbital collection attempts, damaging their jugular veins and causing blood to pool around their hearts, perforating their tracheas and nerves while trying to draw blood from their necks, and exposing their bones by removing too much tissue from “blood collection sites”.
- By rupturing their lungs and asphyxiating them through the improper use of anesthesia machines.
- By “inappropriately” or “unsuccessfully” ending their lives – and, then, placing their injured but living bodies in carcass freezers.
Oh yeah, and by using Krazy Glue as surgical glue.
These aren’t accidents, and they aren’t outliers. These are routine and predictable outcomes of a system that encourages anyone with a scalpel and a grant to play god. A system that sacrifices lives not for knowledge, but for credentials. For careers. For resume lines and publication counts.
None of this meets even the most basic standards of ethics, of science, or of logic.
If these things happened in a veterinary clinic, the clinic would be shut down.
If they happened to humans, someone would be going to jail.
But, when they happen inside animal research labs?
They’re called “education”. They’re called “science”. They’re called “progress”.
We call them what they are: torture.
And, we ask you to help us stop them – because they will continue until we do.