Over 100 million species, including mice, rodents, amphibians, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, primates, fish, as well as birds, are slaughtered in U.S. laboratories each year for biology education, medical training, curiosity-driven experiments, and pharmaceutical, drug, food, and cosmetics testing.
Prior to actually their deaths, a few are made to breathe deadly gasses, some are restrained in restraining devices for hours, others have holes bored into their heads, and some have their skin burnt off or entire spinal cords smashed. Similar to the anguish of the tests, animals in labs are denied everything natural and valuable to them and should be imprisoned in small cages, physically isolated, and mentally scarred, as stated by a report from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or PETA.
In present times, mother monkeys who are removed from their young occasionally seek consolation in soft toys: this latest result from Harvard trials has sparked considerable disagreement among scientists and renewed the ongoing controversy over animal research. "Triggers for mother love," penned by Margaret Livingstone a neuroscientist, and was disseminated in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in Sept. with no fanfare or media coverage.
"Triggers For Mother Love"
However, as word of the paper circulated on social media, it sparked a firestorm of criticism, culminating in a petition to PNAS signed by over 250 experts demanding a retraction. Likewise, animal rights activists recalled Livingstone's previous work, which included briefly suturing young monkeys' eyelids shut to determine the effect on cognition.
Hobaiter told AFP that she was waiting for a response from the magazine before speaking more, but that she anticipated news shortly. Harvard, as well as Livingstone, have each firmly supported the study. However, according to Harvard Medical School, Livingstone's findings may assist researchers to comprehend mother attachment in humans and potentially influence consoling measures to help people deal with grief in the early aftermath of having a miscarriage or witnessing a still delivery. PETA opposes all types of testing on animals and regularly objects to such activities.
This dispute has elicited significant reactions in the scientific community, particularly among animal behavior researchers and primatologists, according to Alan McElligot of the City University of Hong Kong's Centre for Animal Health, a co-signer of the PNAS letter.
McElligot told the media that Livingstone seems to have repeated studies from the mid-twentieth century by Harry Harlow, a well-known American psychologist. Harlow's investigations on maternal depression in rhesus macaques were deemed pioneering, but they may also have aided in the preclinical animal liberation movement. McElligot says that the instance is symbolic of a greater issue in animal experimentation, in which problematic experiments and articles continue to go through institutional review and get published in high-impact journals.
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More Monkey Testings
According to a report from Phys, McElligot cited a widely panned 2020 report that extolled the effectiveness of foot snares in capturing jaguars as well as cougars for scientific research in Brazil. Recently, controversial marmoset trials involving invasive operations have sparked debate. The nonpartisan FDA Modernization Act, enacted by the US Senate in September, would repeal a mandate that experimental medications be tested on animals before being tested on humans.
The great majority of medications that pass animal studies fail in human trials, and emerging technologies like tissue cultures, micro organs, and AI models are lowering the need for real animals. Critics also claim that the large quantities of money flowing through government subsidies to academics and other organizations - $15 billion yearly, according to the advocacy organization White Coat Waste - reinforce a system wherein animals are seen as lab resources.
Most scientists disagree with PETA's absolutist attitude and instead conform to the "three Rs" concept of refining, replacing, and reducing animal usage.
In Livingstone's study, Holly Root-Gutteridge an animal behaviorist at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom said that the fundamental questions could have been investigated on wild macaques that regularly lost their young, and she urged neuroscientists to collaborate with animal behaviorists to develop ways to reduce injury.
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