While I was in school at Michigan State University, back in the 1970s, I cleaned small steel box-like cages that housed mice at a research lab on campus. The couple of bucks an hour that I made keeping those 500 cages clean helped add to my meager student income.
I’d ride my bike from our (husband No.1 and my daughter’s) married housing apartment a couple of miles to the histology lab where they studied the microscopic structure of tissues, using the brains of mice. I cleaned the room of shoe-box sized mouse cages that were stacked on metal shelves.
Once a lone mouse became a pain in the neck, bouncing around its cage like a nutcase. I’d have to open its box so carefully as it bounced around, making it almost impossible to clean the cage without it escaping.
In thinking back, I can’t remember the specifics of cleaning; did I wear gloves? I think I picked the mice up by hand and transferred them to a clean cage. If research done on the little buggers was memory research, it hasn’t benefited me, that’s for sure!
That crazy lone mouse did escape and I couldn’t find it in the large room with all the racks, let alone catch it. I called in the guy in charge to help and no luck there.
Rodents 1: humans zero.
Thinking back on it, placid mice seemed to be ones with families. One day there’d be two mice, the next day a dozen of them, a “horde” as they’re called.
I believe they’re a communal animal. After looking mice up on the internet; communal vs solitary, results say they typically live in groups with a single dominant male, several females and their offspring and subordinate males.
When I cleaned out their cages, I never thought of them as anything other than rodents and test subjects. Certainly not mom and dad and brothers and sisters.
The histology lab also had rats they used, to study their brains. The rats were kept in the basement and while walking down the stairs the one time I went down into the darkness, I could hear the scurry of giant rats’ feet against their metal cages.
Showing off, the technician for the rats chose a rat for the next study – meaning he was going to kill it by swinging it into the air and then knocking it out on the lab counter. Except the technician didn’t knock it out and the rat ran up the guy’s lab coat and the guy had to repeat the deadly procedure again. With the rat limp, the tech put it in the guillotine and beheaded it.
That was the last time I went to the histology lab. I quit my job.
Rodents zero: humanity zero.
Gruesome tale, but that was the reality of my experience with animal research. Reality that most people know nothing about.
Where was PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) back then? PETA was founded in 1980, well after my experience at the histology lab.
Plus they couldn’t help the rodents anyway.
PETA states, “Even though these animals (mice and rats) feel pain and suffer as much as dogs, cats, and rabbits do, they are excluded from the meager federal Animal Welfare Act provisions that extend at least some protection to other species. Because mice and rats are not protected by the law, experimenters don’t even have to provide them with pain relief.”
In a 2019 post, an MSU site stated a future building to be much bigger than where I worked, “The animal facility, will have dedicated mouse and rat surgery suites, procedural and behavioral rooms, and space to house over 4000 cages of mice and rats.”
Imagine cleaning those cages and the resulting deaths.
I suppose by cleaning such cages at the histology lab I helped in research that benefitted humanity somehow. MSU is among the top research universities in the world (as per msutoday.msu.edu). I just wasn’t cut out for the demise of all those mice and rats. My area of study was horticulture, the study of plant and soil science, entomology, pathology and technology. Plants. Peace. Beauty. Bugs.
What’s a girl to do?…can’t say that I’d love to see any little rodents in my house but if one should show up, I’d let my cats deal with it, hoping they’d take it outside to play a game of cat and mouse.
Lucy Llewellyn Byard welcomes comments and shares. To contact her, email lucywgtd@gmail.com
