Experiments on Mice, distorted results!
A new study demonstrates the lack of credibility from results based on the animal model. Where and when the manipulation of conditions influences the results ...
A new study demonstrates the lack of credibility from results based on the animal model. Where and when the manipulation of conditions influences the results …
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!