Every single day, our tax dollars are used to fund exploitation disguised as science. But it’s not every day that we get a glimpse inside an animal research lab.
Our friends at Animal Partisan won a legal battle to expose a federally-funded experiment conducted by University of California San Francisco (UCSF) researchers and titled “Pain and Itch Processing in Aged Mice”. The big discovery from this research that UCSF wanted to keep hidden? Mice experience pain when burned, poked, plied with acid, and surgically mutilated, and they itch when injected with itch-inducing irritants.
Yes, you read that right. Animal researchers were paid — with your taxdollars — to torture mice and, then, proudly report that they . . . well . . . tortured mice.
Here’s how these so-called scientists spent your money:
→ Ignoring extensive human data on pain and aging, they bought genetically modified and inbred C57BL/6 mice from The Jackson Laboratory.
→ They imprisoned these mice in artificial lab environments for months.
→ They arbitrarily decided that 6-month-old mice were equivalent to 20-30-year-old humans, and 22-24-month-old mice to 56-69-year-old humans.
Then, the real horror began:
→ They stabbed the mice’s feet with rods through wire mesh.
→ They forced their tails into hot water baths and forced their feet onto hot places, waiting for them to lick, flinch, or jump.
→ They applied acid to their feet to see how violently they recoiled.
→ They injected itch-inducing chemicals into their necks and counted how many times they scratched themselves in distress.
→ They surgically mutilated their sciatic nerves to induce nerve damage and chronic pain conditions.
Then, they killed them.
Above: Before researchers killed the mice in this experiment, they injected itch-inducing chemicals into the mice’s necks, then watched and recorded while the mice incessantly scratched. (Source: UCSF via Animal Partisan)
The “finding” from this obscene ordeal? That the mice experienced severe and unusual pain responses to the severe pain inflicted by animal researchers.
That’s literally it, and even that’s wrong — because the pain responses were not unusual.
The researchers attempted to justify their “research” by focusing on the differences between the responses of the younger and older mice – reporting that older mice experienced pain differently than did the younger mice (by, for example, displaying less pain before mutilation and, then, more pain after mutilation).
Only, that’s old news and should have been expected.
Not only have numerous previous rodent studies already compared pain responses in young and aged animals, but myriad human studies — spanning acute experimental pain, chronic pain conditions, and neuropathic pain — demonstrate that older age can alter pain sensitivity and reporting.
This means that the researchers either feigned ignorance or did not understand existing science:
- It should have come as no surprise that the older individuals demonstrated less pain prior to mutilation because, as even human research had already shown, 1) aging decreases sensitivity to low-intensity pain, and 2) older individuals have reduced sensitivity to acute pain stimuli (like heat).
- It should have come as no surprise that the older individuals demonstrated more pain after mutilation because, again, as even human research had already established, 1) older individuals can be more vulnerable to chronic pain due to changes in pain processing, and 2) neuropathic pain often worsens with age.
All this UCSF study represents, then, is yet another example of animal researchers producing nothing to advance human health — only delivering suffering while squandering your tax dollars.
And, they will continue doing this — pursuing harmful, pointless, repetitive experiments and trying to hide them from us – for as long as we allow it. Because animal research is a business, and pain sells.
We must continue demanding an end to this perverse, wasteful industry. Please join us in taking action today by supporting the SPARE Act.
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