Question: if your research is about drug developement how does zoology fit in to that? :S

Michelle Hudson-Shore answered on 15 Jun 2010:

This is a good question.
Zoology is about understanding how animals’ bodies work, how they behave and how they interact with their environment. In drug development scientists use animals as models of humans to check that the drugs that they are making work and are safe enough to try in people. The work I do involves trying to find alternatives to these animal models so I have to understand how the laboratory animals react to drugs and chemicals so that I can comment on whether it is similar enough to humans for the results to actually mean anything or not.

Understanding how animals interact with their environment also helps me to give advice on how to improve laboratory cages and housing so that the animals that are currently used are kept in as natural conditions as possible and their welfare is as high as possible.

Knowing how an animal behaves is also useful for improving it’s welfare by decreasing the stress that experiments put them under. For example because we know that dogs prefer to live in packs then keeping them in groups in labs rather than on their own means that they are much happier. Monkeys are very intelligent and you can train them using rewards to cooperate with the scientist during experiments, e.g. coming out of their cage and standing on a weighing scale rather than being chased and caught and forced to do it.