The below account was submitted to Rise for Animals by a former husbandry staff member who worked in the animal research facilities at Oregon Health and Science University. Words and photographs are their own. 

When you think of animal testing, what do you picture?

After working for Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), I have a much more intimate knowledge of the rampant animal and human mistreatment at OHSU.

I was immediately struck by the sheer scale of the operation.

Spread across several buildings, the facility had 15-20 thousand cages of mice, which could hold as many as 5 individuals in a cage. And this was just mice. We cared for mice, rats, gerbils, guinea pigs, finches, ferrets, rabbits, dogs, pigs, and sheep depending on the time of year and study demands.

The research, in many ways, felt like a frustrating confirmation of the feelings I already had about science in academia.

As a husbandry staff member, we were often treated quite poorly by the principal investigators (PIs) and their research assistants. It seemed that they viewed us as lesser-than and felt a constant need to remind us of that.

This surprising disdain stretched often to the animals. Researchers handled mice and rats aggressively, with little care, and often did extremely challenging procedures on them.

One on occasion, I heard of a rat and her litter being left alive in the freezer after carbon dioxide euthanasia was performed improperly.

I found rodents in so many brutal moments, with the top of their skull missing and their brain exposed following cranial surgery, with enormous cancerous tumors implanted in them that would often become raw and infected, or even necrotic. I found mice that had cannibalized their newborns, pups, and cage mates out of anxiety.

Mice often came back from surgery with massive staples messily closing their skin together, often unsuccessfully, causing their liquid absorbent bedding to be soaked in blood. Even alone, mice weren’t saved from being maimed. They overgroomed themselves, stripping the fur from their stomachs and backs and tearing the skin from their tails out of the abject stress that they faced in the laboratory.

I saw one mouse that had meticulously bitten through his skin and muscle to expose his hip flexor, and each time he tried to walk, you could clearly see the sinewy tendon expand and contract through the hole he had created.

The regulations that labs were required to follow when it came to experimental design were largely determined by the animal’s “sentience,” meaning larger mammals like pigs, dogs, and ferrets got better care. This felt like a draconian position to take, as each animal’s intelligence as decided only by humans determined their quality of life.

But often, even the most “sentient” animals were mistreated.

We had a group of five bonded ferrets that were lovely and social, and a joy to be around, and were there for an auditory input behavioral study. This, to me, felt like something that upon first learning of it, I imagined would be relatively non-invasive. But once old enough, the ferrets went through a procedure to remove the top portion of their skull and install probes directly into their brain that allowed researchers to connect to them and have a “more accurate read” on their brain activity. These metal head caps were permanent, and in a span of six months, two ferrets passed away either during the procedure or due to complications afterwards.

These ferrets also were often deprived of water for hours or days so they would have enough motivation to complete experimental tasks to be rewarded with a measly amount of water or gatorade.

We would get a handful of pigs or dogs and they would be there for a week or less before they were killed to be necropsied for cardiology or neurology studies.

I was told that 98% of the studies performed were terminal, and bore witness to most animals being euthanized while still perfectly healthy.

As husbandry staff, we often had the duty to perform carbon dioxide chamber euthanasia on rodents that the researchers deemed to be “no longer useful,” for whatever reason. Often, this meant that the ones being retired had been too inbred to continue to produce healthy litters.

It was heartbreaking to put so much time and care into feeding, watering, cleaning, and keeping up with each husbandry need for the animals just to be told to murder them or watch them die needlessly. I worked so hard to make their experiences less challenging while they were alive, but it often felt like a moot point, because so much of their lives were about suffering “in the name of science,” when animal testing has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective.

One of the most cruel fates of the lab mouse was to be designated as a sentinel, which were used to determine the health of the overall population. During cage changes, the sentinels’ bedding was made up of a scoop of old bedding from each dirty cage in their colony. They lived in these conditions often for over a year and then were euthanized while still healthy and disease free. The fact that sentinel mice were always female felt like an added cruel joke and commentary on the undeniable misogyny in the sciences.

Upon research and talking with colleagues, I found that OHSU has often been under fire for enabling and covering up animal and human mistreatment, sexual violence, racism, and discrimination.

This was abundantly clear in my department, as myself and colleagues often faced sexual harassment, racism, gender discrimination, and the many challenges of a department managed by all white people; in particular cis-het white men. The husbandry staff was dominated by women and feminine presenting non-binary people, and the misogyny we faced was ever-present.

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to speak on my experience, as the issues I witnessed at OHSU seemed bottomless, both for animals and humans.

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