Published on March 21st in a very serious revue in the magazine Nature, the work of two biologists from the University of Liverpool, Dr. Gouveia and Dr. Pre Hurst. Their work supports what One Voice and its partners in the European Coalition having been saying to end animal experimentation. One Voice and the European Coalition continue to denounce animal experimentation and the scientific validity of work done on animals.
Both researchers show that the stress triggered in mice by one of the most common gestures of laboratory workers, namely to move test animals by holding them by the tail. This "significantly alters their anxiety, which has a major impact on the reliability of their response to stimuli in behavioural tests ".
Most animal experiments, invasive or not, involve the manipulation of rodents (more than 1 million each year in France), and mice are the most used in behavioural research work on memory, learning, how drugs and other substances affect their brains and cognitive abilities.
If the stress caused by the most basic manipulation is a factor distorting the results, what about all the captive conditions and the tests imposed on all of the victims during an experiment?
In funding these studies, the NC3R (National Research Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Laboratory Animals, the English equivalent of ECVAM at the European level) concludes that other methods need to be used. Manipulation, such as "orientation tunnels". Dr. Mark Prescott mentions for this organization: "This study provides additional evidence, this time scientific, about the need to abandon manipulations by the tails of mice in the laboratory." The organization has also declared the year 2017 as the "well-being of laboratory rodents"!
According to One Voice, this is above all a new proof that the animal model, more in principle than in its modalities, is not adapted for a modern science supposed to produce results transposable to the human. Rather than manipulate mice differently, like other animal victims, let's stop using animals under these maximum stress conditions by holding them in laboratories!
Comments 4
papillon | Wednesday 29 March 2017
wettlé | Tuesday 28 March 2017
LesZouzous | Tuesday 28 March 2017
France 67 | Tuesday 28 March 2017