Conditionally Accepting

In other news (I'm just going to ignore Madame B on the pull again), for various reasons went to visit an animal testing laboratory today.


We saw a seven kilo rabbit called Claus. We were shown 27,000 zebra fish, and some marmosets, and mice, and rats, and guinea pigs - all doing their quiet sad thing for medical research. The people who showed us around were all deeply nice and good. (They are called animal technologists, and they don't do the research, just spend as much time looking after the animals as possible, and reporting researchers when they think they are distressing the animals too much, or not understanding the animals' needs.) It was all...

....I don't know really. You read about it all the time. And think you have opinions and moral limits and ethical concerns about animal research. And seeing the actual animals and talking to the people who actually look after them was provocative (not least of all when one bloke - and I swear this is true [like everything else on hhn btw] - saw that I was standing on the wrong side of the sign warning people not to stand there because that is where they keep the radioactively-tagged mice).

The guy who runs the lab really really wants a new frog system (it is what you keep frogs in). He also taught me a great new word: `phenotypic'. The saddest thing I saw, or heard rather, was that animals who have not yet had diseases or drugs put into them are called naives. Telling that the science community can describe something that has not yet taught THEM something as naive, or that naive could be considered a lack of having an administered disease or drug regime.

Actually one of the other really telling things on this whole weird day was when we were being given a talk about the rights and wrongs of animal testing, and the presenter said that the general public were on the whole `conditional acceptors' of animal testing. What a ridiculous euphemism. I would conditionally accept looking forward to death, or drinking snake blood, or having my (*&^ trapped in the doorway, if the conditions were constantly having my (*&^ trapped in a vice, or drinking snake poison, or having my (*&^ and my (*&^%$% trapped in a door covered in snake poison. I would conditionally accept that hhn is the greatest contribution to moden day raportage if I thought anyone was dumb enough to believe me. I would conditionally accept that I was a looney if enough people told me I was. I would conditionally accept that I was a better dancer than Prince if I had drunk enough tequila.

And another speaker, who was obviously brilliant, but spent too much time telling us how often he hung out with Ministers.

I'm sounding like I am against animal research, which I neither am or am not. It was just very very interesting seeing where it happened, and who did it, and who looked after the animals, and the animals themselves. Sorry to put a downer on the whole Xmas thing, but it is what I did today, which is just about all this blog is about I guess.