Question: Have any of your rats became ill or died due to your testing?

Robert Ives answered on 10 Jun 2019:

Hello. My taste panel rats have never become ill because of testing.

I have had some animals (a very few) become ill from other studies due to the drug being tested. The reasons we use animals are to see whether a drug might work (efficacy) and whether it will be accepted and safe (toxicity). Sometimes, the drugs we test are not safe and this can make an animal sick, but we have trained scientists and vets who keep checking the animals to make sure they are OK. If an animal starts to look sick, our vets will try to make the animal better, but sometimes the animals will have to be put to sleep. Most animals don’t suffer during the experiments and we don’t intend to make the animals sick. If we didn’t use animals, we would have to use humans instead and it would be a person who would get sick or die instead.