Sorry, not doing very well keeping up to date with them at the moment..... Haven't had time to read them yet so hope they're all interesting

BTW - does anyone have any thoughts on whether they prefer each new article to have a new thread or whether you prefer them all lumped together like this? Once I have a backlog like this, I find it easier to post them all in one thread and that way the longer discussions don't get shunted too far down the page. But can also see how it might be harder to find them again at a later date or to have a discussion about them. If anyone cares either way, please let me know!

Suicide in elephants
http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2006/february/41.72.html

Talking elephant surprises scientists (this one didn't work for me - might be my system though
http://www.cbs13.com/video/?id=11495@kovr.dayport.com

Dog-owners 'lead healthier lives'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6279701.stm

Time Magazine: The brain - a user's guide
Current issue (January 29 2007) has section on the human brain, much of it on-line. Apparently lots of non-invasive research on humans which you like to think might ultimately lead to increased understanding of animal sentience and the removal for the "need" for invasive research on animals
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/current/

'Altruistic' brain region found
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6278907.stm
Don't like this sort of article - almost suggests that selfishness is "how you are made" rather than "what you can become". Surely all these regions of the brain must differ at different stages of a person's life and be dependent on how you use your brain?? I don't know - please tell me if you do

Mice Lacking Social Memory Molecule Take Bullying In Stride
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060210091533.htm

Pony bonded to dogs hmmm, I didn't find this cute, struck me as sad, although couldn't work the video
http://www.aolvideoblog.com/2007/01/09/pony-thinks-its-a-dog

I see your point about the 'altruistic brain'. It has been shown that when brain damage occurs, other areas of the brain can be programmed to take over in e.g. stroke victims, so there's no reason to believe that this region is the only one capable of producing an altruist. Maybe this region is the dominant one, meaning that humans (or other animals for that matter) lacking activity here need to 'work harder' at being altruistic, so that nuture becomes crucial.

Thanks Diane, that's interesting and makes sense to me.

Here are a few more.

Radio tags track wasp behaviour
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6291429.stm



This one is the sort of thing I wouldn't normally post as I think it is more "animal rights" rather than "behaviour". So sorry if it offends but I think it is an interesting read (unfortunately it's incomplete as you have to subscribe to get the full article)

"Lives in the Balance"

By Seth Perry

The Chronicle Review

January 26, 2007

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i21/21b01401.htm> (requires paid
subscription)

My parents deal in research animals. They are certified by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture and supply dogs to laboratories for various
medical experiments. Dad does the purchasing and husbandry work, Mom
keeps the books, and they make good money at it.



I accompanied my father on a delivery one day. We took nine dogs to a
university lab, backing Dad's approved delivery vehicle up to the
loading dock of a nondescript building in the middle of a major urban
campus in the wee hours of the morning. The early arrival had something
to do with my father's preferred work schedule, perhaps more to do with
the tacit understanding of all concerned that, however you may feel
about it, this is not the sort of thing one does in the bright light of
day.



Of animal-rights issues, medical research is perhaps the thorniest. The
human use of animals - for companionship, entertainment, food, clothing
- always assumes a hierarchy, one that puts humans at the top or the
center of, variously, the evolutionary order, God's creation, or the
food chain. That hierarchy is intuitive and acceptable to most people.
Our dispositions toward meat and fur and the circus are rarely
conscious, but when they are, there is clear, if callous, calculus to
them. People can come to terms with whatever they feel comfortable with,
or at least are unwilling or unable to give up. We balance a pig's life
and a chicken's freedom against ham and eggs, a cow's contented grazing
against a handbag.



The elements are so much more abstract when it comes to research,
though. The trade-off between animal life lost and medical advancement
gained can never be close to one to one. Research, after all, is just
practice, and many animal-research deaths must produce little more than
checkmarks on clipboards.



[text cut]

I help Dad lead the dogs into the facility. The inside of the building
is a strange blend of hospital and barn. It smells the way I imagine, or
hope, dairies and slaughterhouses smell, of a disinfected animal
presence. It has the sterile feel lent by stainless-steel equipment and
furnishings and long fluorescent hallways, but one of the hallways
features several bales of straw, one of them loose, and a waist-high
stack of bulging bags that I assume to be full of dog food. We have come
in a back way, but as we lead the dogs through the hallways, past
various pass-card-secured doors, we go by what must be the main entrance
to the building. It is the foyer to any university building: some
60s-era chairs, some outdated magazines, a Mao-esque painting of a
middle-aged white man whose family name, I assume, is on the building.
The janitorial staff is getting ready for the day. As we lead the dogs
past the entryway, their toenails clicking on the linoleum under the
ambivalent smile of the donor, one of the dogs, excited and nervous to
be in a new place, defecates her way down the freshly mopped hallway. I
am apologetic to the staff, but all I hear is an exasperated
Spanish-accented voice tell the woman with the mop bucket that she'll
have to come over and clean that up.



We come through a final set of doors to a work area. A rectangular pen
on wheels, which I recognize as a set of scales used for weighing pigs,
sits next to a stainless-steel platform with a digital display attached
- another scale, this one used for more cooperative animals or, in
another setting, airport luggage. The dogs must be weighed on the
platform scale and checked in on arrival - examined for visible signs of
ill health, their markings noted for identification purposes. The
medical staff members wear lab coats and scrubs, and they are
unfailingly nice to the dogs. The two women checking the dogs in barely
cease talking to them throughout the process, cooing to each animal in
that voice we reserve for animals and babies with whom we are pleased.
There is petting, patting, scratching behind the ears. Tails wag.



Completing the picture are two children. Two boys, maybe 5 or 6. They
are out of school for Christmas break, and their mother, the technician
in charge of checking the dogs in, has had no option this morning but to
bring them to work with her. They are adorable, models of boyhood, one
red-haired and freckled, the other dark-haired. Dad and I are bringing
in two dogs at a time, each of us leading one, and on the second trip
Dad's is checked in first. As I stand waiting with the dog I've led in,
the boys come over to pet her. This interaction could happen anywhere;
kids and animals generally, boys and dogs in particular, are inseparable
when in the same room. A split second before it happens, I sense it
coming. The redhead looks up at me.



"What'siz name?"

This dog has no name, son, she has a USDA tracking number, assigned to
her in the order that my mom registered her in the records. That number,
embossed on a metal plate fastened by a light chain around her neck,
will be used to track her as she moves through this facility, until
whatever it is they're doing to her kills her, or they finish with her
and she is either euthanized or, perhaps, put up for adoption. If the
latter, then she'll get a name.



I say that I don't know the dog's name.



I grew up with animals, on a farm, and like all farm kids I learned
early the difference between a working animal and a pet, and I learned
to try not to get too attached to anything until I knew where it stood
with my parents. An agricultural attitude toward animals is built on a
sense of purpose - the expenses of every animal in time, worry, and
money are borne with the assumption that they will be repaid in milk,
meat, or (most often) money from sale. The justifying purpose for a pure
pet is companionship, and animals enjoying such a privileged uselessness
are comparatively rare. If every farm kid saved every animal they ever
cried over, the nation's food stores would be substantially strained.



My parents started selling dogs for research about the time I left for
college - Dad takes considerable glee in noting that the lowly dogs,
along with my financial aid, sent me, debt free, to a top-25 private
university. The business was then and is now something I have disclosed
only to close friends, and, perhaps consequently, I have met with
curiosity and often support from my peers, but never outright hostility.
In the rarefied company of my fellow humanities graduate students,
though, I've never brought it up at all.



Dad has kept animals his entire life; the whole children's-book barnyard
menagerie has passed through his hands - cattle, horses, goats, pigs,
chickens. Although the research business is a relatively recent turn,
dogs kept for hunting had been a constant presence. Until he became
licensed to sell animals for research, he valued dogs only for their
capacity to hunt. Now, however, the dogs have become one more sort of
livestock, each individual bought, raised, and sold interchangeably. In
some ways I think he always thought of the dogs in the same way he
thought of all the other farm animals - while he has certainly had
favorites among his hounds, I don't think he's ever had what would
properly be called a pet.

Dad tells the story of waiting at a veterinarian's office (the strict
USDA controls on research animals make such visits very common) behind
an elderly couple who had come to have a dog put to sleep. The
distraught gentleman, making conversation, asked Dad if he thought dogs
had souls. My dad said no. When he was telling me this story, I
suggested that the old man may have wanted to hear something different,
but Dad insisted that there was no use lying to him since he'd asked an
honest question. Only people have souls, and dogs aren't people, he
explained, any more than cattle and pigs are people.



After the dogs are checked in, we lead them to a room with large
stainless-steel cages down one wall. The cages have rubber floors, and
they are impeccably clean. By the time we bring in the last two dogs,
the first two are stretched out, apparently comfortably, in their new
homes. I do not know what tests these particular dogs are meant for.
Sometimes the dogs that Dad delivers live in the facility for many
months; he knows this because he occasionally comes across them, sitting
in cages next to those in which he is putting new dogs. Other times he
knows that the dogs he takes in on a given morning will not last the
day.



Although the vast majority of animal experiments are carried out on
rodents, the face of animal research is undoubtedly simian. When we
worry about it, we think of chimps in cages. Primates are prohibitively
expensive for most researchers, though, in financial as well as
political terms. The fact that primates get more public attention has to
do with the marketing efforts of animal-rights groups: for a mascot,
better a chimp than a mouse, for obvious reasons.



The rodents are in some ways more disquieting, though; their widespread
use in research draws attention to the unsettling fact that what is
really needed for most medical trials is warm-blooded, ambulatory life,
of which mice are just the cheapest, most easily housed, and most
expendable avatar. It is not the animal that is subjected to chemical
injection and dissection, but the animating feature it carries - the
divine spark human beings share even with mice. How much of this drug
will snuff it out? Can it survive with this plastic implant? If we break
it, can we figure out how to fix it?

The hallway we take back out of the building is mostly bare. Except for
safety and sanitary reminders on a few bulletin boards, the walls are
empty. On one office door, though, is a poster bearing a bald,
sunken-eyed child clutching a stuffed animal. She is sitting in a red
wagon in a hospital hallway, propped on a pillow, wearing Elmo slippers,
and her skin is puffy, her eyes ringed with red and fixed on the viewer.
We all recognize this as the image of the cancer patient, even if we
have never seen one, the way we recognize even abstract images of Elvis
or Christ without having firsthand knowledge of them. With the child's
picture, the poster states, "If there is no animal research, there is no
cure."



The ad's challenge is powerful. It can only be refuted if we are
convinced that cures for lethal human ailments aren't even just a little
bit more probable because of research on animals, or if we believe that
this child's suffering doesn't matter more than the suffering of mice.
That type of argument is especially relevant for my parents because my
niece, their granddaughter, was one of those bald kids, diagnosed with a
tumor on each kidney when she was 22 months old. My dad bawled like a
child when she was diagnosed. Their business is first and foremost a
moneymaking venture, to be sure, but my parents know that it is not
difficult to trace the line from animal research to the chemicals,
instruments, and surgeons who saved her life. When the first piece of
hate mail came, when family and friends started refusing to visit their
home, they fell back on a sense of purpose derived from personal
experience with the benefits of research.



Try as they might, opponents of animal research know they are unable to
break or disrupt the link between that research and the advancement of
human medicine. The same unsettling similarities of the mice and the
dogs to ourselves, and to the child in the poster - the fact that they
share life which can be destroyed in them as well as in us - make them
indispensable for research. That is what none of the alternatives -
cadavers, tissue cultures, computer simulations - can provide.



[text cut]

The thing about research is that it doesn't allow for self-satisfying
half measures. The decision that it's acceptable to crush a rat's spine
to see if we can fix a person's crushed spine, the deliberate creation
of an ailment in one living thing that we're trying to heal in another,
forces us into the bald admission that we really do believe people are
more valuable than animals, that we use animals to benefit ourselves,
and that what we call "humane" in that respect is something we define.

I think part of what makes us human, though, is being uncomfortable with
all of that, ruminating and weighing that discomfort, making our
deliveries in the half-light of morning.



[To view the remainder of this article, please go to the hyperlink
above. Thank you.]

This last article gave me a bloomin nightmare the other night, about bald rats in the lab (we don't have any in reality!).

It really struck home with me, as I work in cancer research as some of you know. Although we don't have animal houses/live animal models, we do use a lot of animal products (antibodies, serum, enzymes, DNA...) and I am always uncomfortable with it, despite knowing that I am doing 'good' for mankind. I do like to think though that someone like me tries harder not to waste such reagents, knowing how precious they are and what occurred for my research to take place.

Suggested reading:
"The China Study", T.Colin Campbell................for those interested in statistics of the "diseases of prosperity".
Rita

Hi Catherine,
I don’t know about anyone else but I always look through your list and if there is an article I want to comment on I would open another thread with its title.
As it is easier for you to group them all altogether is it possible for you to add a search bar to the site so people can find the groups of articles – then it’s just a case of opening each one to find a specific article?

Diane, I think what you said is really important for us non scientific/academic bods to hear - thank you!

Hi Emma

Thanks for your comments. We do have a search facility already on this site (click on "search" link to the right and above the list of threads) but I've never been able to get it to work usefully. If anyone has had more success with it then please let me know your magic formula! Alternatively if anyone is clever with HTML and can send me some lines of code I can incorporate into the preamble at the top of the page then please get in touch because it is beyond me right now!

I've been off-line for a lot of the last few weeks and so now have even more of a backlog of articles to post. But after that I will try much harder to keep on top of them and will go back to doing one article per thread whenever I can.

Thanks
Catherine