• Question: Do you not harm animals in your work????

    Asked by Shnoobs to anuantony, Duncan, Jayne, Katherine, Sajid on 3 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jayne Ede

      Jayne Ede answered on 3 Nov 2017:

      In my day job I don’t personally do anything to animals, however at my place of work other people have jobs which may involve testing on animals. The animal handlers are very skilled, wonderful people who care a lot about the well being of the animals, and some of them even won awards recently for making enrichment areas for the rodents, and doing research into how to assess how happy the animals are when in captivity.

      Its never nice to think about animals getting hurt, but scientists go by the 3 Rs: replace (the need for an animal at all) reduce (the amount of animals required for testing to a minimum), and refine (the way experiments are carried out to make the animals as comfortable as possible.

      Its worth keeping in mind that any medicine – any medicine at all, has been tested on animals in order to have it made available to the public. Hopefully in future we’ll have improved our methods to such sophistication that we don’t need animals at all.

    • Photo: Duncan McNicholl

      Duncan McNicholl answered on 4 Nov 2017:

      I don’t have anything to do with animals in my work, but I work at the Queen’s Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh, and some of the people who work there do work with animals. You can maybe guess from the name of the institute that we do medical research, and the animals are used to help us understand how different drugs and diseases work. They’re very well treated, and everyone who works with them has to have a lot of training before they’re allowed near the animals, but sometimes they are hurt or killed during the course of research. I think the important things to remember are that no one hurts animals because they want to, and that the sacrifice that the animals make means that lots of people get better treatment and have their lives saved.

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