• Question: What is your opinion on animal testing within Psychology? Have you ever personally tested on an animal throughout your training?

    Asked by anon-204925 to Lucy, James on 6 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Lucy Maddox

      Lucy Maddox answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Hi! Really interesting question and a tricky one.
      My personal view is it’s important to minimise unnecessary animal testing and if it is necessary do it very carefully – as ethically as possible – so the animals aren’t unnecessarily in pain or fear. I do think animal studies have told us some things we wouldn’t have been able to find out otherwise, and they make it possible to have new treatments that again we can’t test in humans before we know they are safe.
      I have never tested in a live animal, but for my Masters project I was looking at what happened in mice which had a specific gene knocked out, so that involved slicing up mice brains and staining them with different chemicals and then looking at the slices under a lot of different microscopes, including one that you had to use in a dark room to see if there were glowing bits in the mouse brains. The point of the project was to improve treatment of a rare children’s disease called Batten’s Disease so it felt like it justified the experiments, but at the time I was a vegetarian, so I did think very carefully about it.

    • Photo: James Munro

      James Munro answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Hey!

      I have a mixed opinion on this. For years I have worked with colleagues who do animal testing for various difference sciences. I actually own many pet rats because of all the emails I received asking if I wanted some rats for testing with Psychology before they would be killed. For someone who loves animals as much as I do, these emails were difficult for me to read, so I wanted to give some animals a happy home, to pay tribute to the many who had their lives taken to improve human lives and knowledge.

      Animal testing in areas like chemistry and medicine is often easier to accept for me. If a new pill might cure an awful disease then experiments using the pill might be seen as justifiable. Though I suppose this depends on whether you believe humans should have the right to use animals for their own improvement.

      Animal testing in psychology often frustrates me. In my PhD I studied brain cells called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are pretty cool but they don’t have a lot of obvious helpful applications. Meaning they are interestingto know about but don’t necessarily make human lives better. Mirror neurons were discovered in monkey brains, and a lot of monkeys have had pretty awful things done to their brains in order to find out what mirror neurons can do. These experiments happen in different countries around the world, and while the UK may have very strong ethical laws about animal testing, maybe the laws are less strict on different continents. It makes me worry and often I don’t know if it is right for me to continue to study these things if the knowledge comes from animal suffering.

      However, Psychology has produced many amazing things that are really useful. Robotic limbs that are controlled by the brain can really help people who have lost limbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_brnKz_2tI These robotics come directly from animal testing research.

      It is a very complicated question – I have never tested on animals directly, but I benefit from research that has and does test on animals. Almost all psychologists and biologists do, as well as most members of the public. I hope that by treating my own pets with kindness and honouring animal sacrifice by using my skills and knowledge to help people, that it might all balance out.

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