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Asked by anon-233559 to Varun, Sammie, Rebecca, Anna, Alin, Adam on 13 Nov 2019.
Question: do you hurt animals in your work?
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Rebecca Shaw answered on 13 Nov 2019: last edited 13 Nov 2019 9:38 am
Sometimes, my work does involve animals.
For example, I had to take samples from birds during my Master’s project and it involved pricking their wing vein with a needle, so I can imagine it would be similar to us getting an injection! So not terribly sore, but uncomfortable.
Before we get to work with animals for research purposes, we have to go through loaads and loaads of training before we ourselves are confident that we can handle the animals well. We are also taught how not to hurt the animals when doing them to ensure that the animals are okay. We also look after the animals really well and make sure they get treats after we’ve held them. Sometimes it’s necessary to use animals for research – especially when we are studying them, but we try not to use animals when possible too. -
Adam Washington answered on 13 Nov 2019:
I’m rather squeamish, which is part of the reason that I’m in physics instead of biology. That said, I have done some research on bird feathers, beetle scales, butterfly wings, and polar bear hair.
With the bird feathers, we collected the molted feathers from the bottom of the cage of a live and happy parrot. The beetle scales I know less about – we simply bought a dead beetle on ebay. The butterfly wings had been collected by a geneticist who went through proper ethics review for her experiment and who I trust not to abuse the animals. As for the polar bear hair, a colleague of mine got permission to clips a small tuft of it from a polar bear in a local museum who had died before either of us had ever been born.
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Varun Ramaswamy answered on 13 Nov 2019:
Fortunately, I don’t work with animals..I only work with bacteria and viruses.
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Anna Kalorkoti answered on 13 Nov 2019:
Like Sammie and Varun, I’m lucky to work in an area that doesn’t involve animals. We’re also very careful not to hurt animals indirectly by the work that we do. For example, some of the chemicals we work with can be quite nasty. If we’re careless in how we get rid of them, they could end up in the soil or in rivers and hurt animals out in the wider world. We have to make sure we get rid of them in the right way so that this can’t happen. This is something the law requires of us, and it’s also the right thing to do!
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