"Golden Wooden Path 2025": Voting for the Most Ridiculous Animal Experiments is On!
- "Amount of dye that causes rat suffocation"
duration: ≈ 3 min read
Folks, get ready to cast your vote for the most ludicrous animal experiments! The association "Doctors Against Animal Experiments" has recognized some truly bizarre experiments that they believe are both cruel and scientifically misguided. These top five experiments compete for the "Golden Wooden Path" award, and you get to decide the winner!
One of the experiments, conducted by the chemical company BASF’s Experimental Toxicology and Ecology department, investigates just how much dye rats can inhale before suffocating. Twenty rats are stuffed in tubes, with only their noses exposed, and forced to breathe in air with blue dye powder for four hours. The results are terrifying - all rats exposed to higher amounts of dye die within a couple of days. Even those exposed to lower amounts face breathing disorders for days on end. After 14 days, these surviving rats are put down and their tissues are examined. Yeah, sure, that sounds just peachy.
At the Clinic for Orthodontics of the University Hospital Düsseldorf, the poor rats are even less fortunate. Sixty-one of them have titanium implants screwed into their tailbones under anesthesia, and a metal spring is connected to apply pressure on the implants. These implants are then examined at different times using imaging methods, and the rats are ultimately put to sleep. Man, our orthodontist friends are not messing around, huh?
The Institute of Anatomy of the University Medicine Rostock also makes the list. They are studying whether the minds of starving mice shrink. To do this, these mice have their food intake reduced by more than half after ten days, causing them to lose 20% of their weight. Clever, huh? Then, when they maintain their lower weight, the experimenters observe how often they use their running wheel in the cage. At the experiment's end, the mice are killed, and their brains are examined.
The Bionics Innovation Center of the University of Bremen carried out two separate experiments on locusts. One involved keeping at least 1,154 of these poor creatures in a centrifuge under three, five, or eight times the force of gravity for two weeks. Up to 93% of the locusts died as a result. Oh, and if that weren’t enough, they also had weights attached to their backs, causing up to 96% of them to perish.
Lastly, the Chair of Animal Physiology at the University of Tübingen is testing the consciousness of crows by drilling holes into their skulls, inserting electrodes into their brains, and asking them to identify symbols on a monitor. If the crow successfully guesses whether they've seen a specific symbol, they are rewarded with food. If they don’t, apparently they weren't awarded anything. Reviews on this study are a bit mixed, it seems.
So, have your say and vote for the most absurd of these experiments! Voting is open until Monday, March 24, 2025, at 11:59 PM. For those interested, more information can be found on the "Golden Wooden Path" website.
- Topics: Animal Experiments, Vote, Rats, Crow
Background Info:
- The “Golden Wooden Path” award is given out by the association “Doctors Against Animal Experiments” to recognize experiments deemed cruel, absurd, and scientifically misguided.
- BASF has been criticized for conducting multiple animal experiments in its Experimental Toxicology and Ecology department, including the inhalation toxicity study involving rats.
- The term “LC50” refers to the concentration of a substance that is lethal to 50% of the test subjects, while “NOAEC” refers to the no observed adverse effect concentration.
- Specific Examples:
- Inhalation Toxicity Studies: Experiments involving exposing rodents, like rats or mice, to potentially harmful substances in order to determine the concentration that causes bodily harm or death. Such experiments can help regulate the use of chemicals and ensure consumer safety.
- Orthodontic Implant Studies: Investigating the efficacy of dental implants through animal testing, often using rodents like rats. This type of research can help optimize implant design and improve surgical techniques for human patients.
- Brain Activity Studies: Researching brain activity in non-human animals in order to better understand neural mechanisms, cognitive processes, and potential learning and memory abilities. This research can provide valuable insights into the workings of the human brain.
- Anatomy Studies: Examining the structure and function of the animal body, primarily focusing on specific organs or systems. Such investigations can help advance our understanding of the human body and contribute to the development of medical treatments.
- Animal Testing Controversies:
- Ethical Concerns: Critics argue that animal testing is unethical due to the commonly perceived similarity between animals (particularly mammals like mice, rats, and primates) and humans. They argue that causing harm or death to an animal goes against moral obligations to protect life.
- Limitations: Some question the validity of using animal models to study human diseases. Animal physiology, anatomy, and metabolic processes differ from those of humans in many significant ways, making it difficult to extrapolate results from animal studies to humans.
- Alternatives: Advocates for alternative testing methods (e.g., computer simulations, cell cultures, or tissue chips) argue that these methods are more ethically sound, cost-effective, and efficient than animal testing. They claim that these alternative methods can provide similar insights into the effects of substances and treatments while helping reduce animal suffering.
- Legal Regulations: Animal testing is regulated by various national and international laws and guidelines to ensure the ethical treatment of animals, minimize suffering, and reduce the number of animals used in research. Examples of such regulations include the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 in the UK and the Animal Welfare Act in the US.
- The Institute of Anatomy's community policy on experimentation includes studying the effects of anorexia on mice, where their food intake is drastically reduced, resulting in weight loss and potential observations of brain activity.
- In the orthodontic department at University Hospital Düsseldorf, experiments on mice involve anesthetizing them before screwing metal implants into their tails for testing, which raises questions about the environmental impact of such procedures and the humane treatment of mice.
- The Bionics Innovation Center's golden rule for testing on locusts is to minimize harm, yet their experiments involving subjecting locusts to extreme conditions, such as centrifugation and weight deliberation, have resulted in high mortality rates, sparking concerns about the cruelty and effectiveness of these tests.
