Understanding animal well-being can transform a story and reveal deeper truths.
Image by tiburi from Pixabay, public domain.
The metal floor is cold, echoing the rustling of a dozen other lonely beings. There is nothing to do but drink sour water to blur the emptiness. Eat, drink, sleep, repeat. On and on, until the end.
It might sound like purgatory, but this unnatural, empty world describes the reality of many rats and other rodents used in addiction research. However, for both addicts and rats, this research environment is deeply flawed: the rats in these studies have abysmal animal welfare.
For a long time, psychologists theorized that addiction was simply caused by exposure to opiates and other addictive substances. The studies that informed that theory measured the amount of opiates that rats self-administered while housed alone in barren cages.
In the 1980s, Dr. Bruce Alexander questioned whether rats’ poor housing during research experiments influenced research outcomes. To answer the question, he established Rat Park, a large social housing enclosure bedded with wood shavings and sprinkled with tunnels and hidey-holes.
Rats housed in Dr. Alexander’s Rat Park only occasionally self-administered opiates. His findings—and his concern for animal welfare—revolutionized the field.
Environments conducive to good animal welfare consider animals’ health, affective states (i.e., mental well-being), and the naturalness of their environments. And, for better or worse, animal welfare intersects with our lives in a plethora of ways.
For example, poor animal welfare increases animals’ stress, which depresses immune function and increases the risk of opportunistic infections—microorganisms that an animal’s body would normally ignore or easily fight off that instead cause disease. Despite these intersections, it remains overlooked by journalists and scientists.
When the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading across borders, media coverage highlighted how caging many species of wild animals in close proximity was a key component in COVID’s emergence from the Wuhan wet markets. Yet, few articles mentioned the animals’ welfare, and none described how their poor welfare facilitated the disease’s emergence and transfer to humans.
The animals in Wuhan’s wet markets were kept in barren cages in a strange, noisy environment. Any animal confined to such conditions would experience intense stress and a dramatic decrease in immune function. Yet, a Google search of “animal welfare” and “COVID” largely yields news articles on pandemic pets.
This isn’t an isolated case of oversight. In recent years, journalists have prioritized communicating whether reported biomedical research used animal models. However, reporting the experiences of animal models is just as important.
That being said, journalists may struggle to report on animal welfare when it’s largely ignored by scientists themselves. Despite the impact of Alexander’s Rat Park experiments, many scientists continue to overlook animal welfare as a potentially confounding variable in their experiments.
Poor animal welfare affects much more than immune function. According to the book Mental Health and Well-being in Animals, stressed animals “can have profound differences in their biology compared to non-stressed animals.”
For example, the search for effective Alzheimer’s treatments has driven researchers to explore monkey models and even monkey-human chimera models. Monkeys are not only far more expensive to house and care for than mice, they also live longer and have greater cognitive and social needs, putting them at a higher risk of poor welfare in captivity.
A study of over 1000 rhesus macaques, one of the most commonly used monkey species in biomedical research, found that most laboratory monkeys exhibited at least two kinds of stereotypies — abnormal, repetitive behaviours that arise from poor welfare. Crucially, 67.5% of the monkeys exhibited pacing stereotypies, a behaviour that may invalidate neuroscientific findings.
However, coverage of the monkey-human chimera article focuses only on the ethics of experimenting on animals with human DNA, ignoring that monkeys are already failing to cope with experimental conditions and that those conditions may be impacting data validity.
We use animals in research because of their similarities to humans. Yet, these similarities do not exist in a vacuum, independent of animals’ emotional experiences. As journalists, scientists, and science communicators, it is our job to seek the truth. It’s important to ask questions. Here are a few to consider during your next interview:
What did this animal evolve to do? Or alternatively, how does this animal live in the wild? How is their current living situation different?
The greater the difference, the more likely an animal is to be stressed. You can also pose the question to the person responsible for caring for the animal. Do they paint a rich picture or do they dumb down the animal’s experience? The latter may be a red flag.
Ask about how the animals were trained or handled. What kind of punishments and/or rewards were used to train them? If animals were restrained, how? Different kinds of training and handling can either decrease or increase an animal’s stress independently from the rest of their environment.
Finally, could an animal’s stress have a ripple effect? Common examples of ripples include, but are not limited to, research outcomes and disease spread.
Scientists and journalists may be expected to pump out content like machines, but we are very much animals. We bleed, we hurt, we hide our pain, and we hope for something better, just like them. Yet, until we acknowledge the extent of our similarities, we will continue to search in vain for the answers to our ailments.
By Valerie Monckton
Valerie is a freelance writer, editor and researcher with an MSC in Animal Behaviour and Welfare from the University of Guelph.
Find Valerie on X as @MoncktonValerie and LinkedIn
