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Asked by hayleybrooks1 to Louise on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: Money.
Question: why would you want to buy cockroaches with the money
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Louise Pendry answered on 17 Mar 2010:
Hey Haley,
Sorry about the delay replying. That’s a good question (wasn’t it you that asked me the other good question yesterday? Good stuff) 🙂
I want to use cockroaches for behaviour workshops to get students like you interested in animal welfare research. I am guessing you have read about this on my profile so I won’t cover this again (unless you ask me to!). I think what you are asking is ‘why use cockroaches? Why not some other animal like a rat or a chicken or a dog?’
There are lots of reasons really:
1. It’s more practical. To carry out proper experiments students need large sample sizes (lots of animals) so that they can compare effects between treatments (here morning and afternoon training sessions are different treatments e.g. if you want to know if cockroaches learn quicker in the morning or the evening you need lots of cockroaches to test this). It’s not practical to have loads of bigger animals so would limit what we could do in a workshop. Plus, I keep them at my house so I need to use animals that don’t take up much space!!!
2. Easy to handle – the cockroaches I use are big, move slowly and don’t bite – so this makes them ideal subjects to work with. Even my chickens peck me sometimes and the pigs at work often nibble the researchers legs (pigs are nosey and like to check out things with their mouths!)
3. Ethics – lots of experiments using animals need ethical approval. The law governing animal use does not cover insects because people believe that insects are not conscious. If they are not conscious they cannot suffer. If they cannot suffer they don’t need protecting. This means I can use cockroaches without having to get ethical approval first.
This is useful because I like students to design their own experiments so I don’t know what we will do with the cockroaches until I am in the classroom! If I don’t know what we are going to do I cannot get ethical approval before starting – and ethics committees take weeks to decide on whether to give permission so it would not be possible to run these workshops.
Don’t worry – I don’t let anyone do anything mean to the cockroaches though!!!BTW – cockroaches are dumbasses in the morning and really smart in the evening – but nobody knows why this is! Why do you think this is?
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Comments
hayleybrooks1 commented on :
my origonal thought was why not use the money to have access to interactive technology like what is used in morgues for forensic examination that creates a 3 dimensional perspective.
but thankyou for giving me a more detailed explanation. and the fact that animals that potentially can survive nuclear blasts are separate from animal ethics is a new one to me
the fact that they do now take up much space is brilliant!!!! and that they do not bite.
the fact that you are using them to find out if they are fast learners is amazing as to the fact that they apparently have no conscious
some other creatures that i think would be good to study are shrimps (~not the edible ones but the teeny tiny ones) as they react differently depending on their enviroment
AMAZING – even though i hate cockroaches i would love to see something like that. but wouldn’t it be to the fact that because the cockroaches are slow in moving means that their brainwaves are slower
Louise commented on :
Hi Haley,
Thanks for replying so quick. Its nice to get feedback and know people are reading what I say! Yeah – it sometimes suprises me too that insects are disregarded. It is because they is no ‘proof’ that they are conscious. They don’t have a proper brain (one like mammals) with a cerebral cortex. Instead they have a small bundle of neurones (much less than in more ‘complex’ animals so we think that they cannot be conscious because of this.
But there was a really interesting paper (essay) published in a journal called Animal Welfare. I remember reading it years ago and have never forgotten it. It was by a guy called Chris Sherwin. He wrote about all the learning that insects can do. Some – like Bees – use complex methods of communciation that are similar to language. So maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume conscious until proven otherwise!
Scientists used to think that mammals weren’t conscious too. This is why dogs were just tied to a table and operated on conscious in the old days (google Descartes). Now we accept that they are conscious & feel pain so its not allowed. So may be one day if we do the research we’ll find out that insects also have an awareness. The problem is that scientists (and philosophers) still don’t fully agree on what consciousness is! It’ll also open up a huge can of worms if we do – what about insecticides like fleas spray? Would using them then be cruel? Acceptable?
Cockroaches moving slow – I think it has more to do with the rest of the physiology. They respond to the ambient room temperature. If it is too cold they become very sluggish. As it gets warmer they get faster. They are also faster at night when its dark.
Surviving a nuclear blast doesn’t rely on consciousness though. Its a size thing. If you put an ant in the microwave it may survive – just because it is small enough to stand between the micro-waves. If it was unlucky enough to be standing when the wave went it would die just like anything else. Its small size just gives it a bigger chance of avoiding the wave.
Louise commented on :
C.M. Sherwin, Can invertebrates suffer? Or how robust is argument-by-analogy?, Animal Welfare 10 (2001), pp. S103–S118
This was the paper. I don’t know if your school can get hold it it though. If you really want it let me know and we’ll see if we can find a way to get you a copy!
Louise commented on :
“AMAZING – even though i hate cockroaches i would love to see something like that. but wouldn’t it be to the fact that because the cockroaches are slow in moving means that their brainwaves are slower”
Just been thinking more about your suggestion – you are brilliant!!!!!!!!! You could well be right and well on the right tracks. For animals to learn their nerve cells need to ‘remember’ past behaviour. We know that different conditions in the environment affect learning e.g. you’d find it hard to learn math if there was a lion loose in the room. What is it about the morning and the evening that affects their ability to learn? YOU could make some predictions on this basis and investigate it. Is it the darkness? Temperature? Time since feeding? Oooooo – you have me excited now 🙂
Come back and talk to me!