A Special Undercover Investigation ... in Our Investigator’s Own Words
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Mice with bleeding, oozing sores and enormous tumors were left to die, while those who survived were crowded into cages and abused in painful experiments.
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 I hope this article makes people think long and hard about an issue that I find deeply troubling: the use of mice and rats in laboratories. For six months, I worked as an animal care technician in the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) Thurston Bowles Building, where these little animals are used nonstop in alcohol, dopamine, and nicotine experiments. I am ashamed to say it now, but when I took this job, I was grateful that my first assignment involved “only” mice and rats.
I thought that working with dogs or monkeys would be far more emotionally challenging. I was wrong!
I hope my heavy heart will fill yours with compassion for these beleaguered, forgotten animals.
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| The things I witnessed are not allowed by internal policy or federal guidelines ... |
On October 15, 2001, I started my training at UNC. Within a very short time, I learned that mice and rats there were considered disposable objects. Their pain and suffering is overlooked even as they convulse and die in their cages, even as they tear each other up because of gross overcrowding, and even if, on the rare occasions that it occurred, a veterinarian actually showed up to check on them. Here are some of the things I witnessed:
 • Animals with tumors so big that it seemed impossible for them to carry them around and animals with oozing abscesses ready to burst
• Mice with untended teeth so hideously overgrown that they were unable to eat. I saw mice with bottom teeth that had grown all the way up to their noses. Some of them actually starved to death.
• Mice and rats who had been inadequately gassed or had undergone improper “cervical dislocation” (neck breaking) still alive in the dead animal cooler—frightened little rodents with broken necks waiting to die on top of a pile of their dead fellow labmates and unable to move
 • Genetically engineered “nude” mice—already an aberration of nature-tortured by capsule-shaped implants that were almost as long as their fragile bodies, breaking through their thin skin
• A researcher joking as he held up a tiny white mouse in front of me saying, “Say, ‘Bye-bye’!” before beheading her with a pair of kitchen scissors
• A researcher telling me that he is supposed to (but doesn’t) numb young rats with ice (!) before cutting their heads off with scissors and removing their brains. Even very young rats scream, and I won’t ever forget that for as long as I live.
 • A beautiful white rat who was left, paralyzed and terrified, to die in his cage, although I reported his dire condition three times—twice to the head veterinarian
• Mice and rats in alcohol studies suffering from chronic diarrhea and dehydration. When I pointed out a suffering mouse who needed to be euthanized, a researcher told me, “If he dies, he dies.”
• A researcher who walked into one of my mouse rooms, grabbed 23 mice out of their cages and crushed their necks by using the metal cage-card devices that hold identification information. I found one of these mice alive and paralyzed in the dead animal cooler moments after the researcher placed them there.
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The experimenters know they can get away with almost anything ...
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The things I witnessed and documented in the Thurston Bowles Building are not allowed by internal policy or by federal guidelines. But that doesn’t matter because the animal care committee’s inspections are a farce. Researchers even ordered me to remove cards identifying severe overcrowding from the cages when they knew that the committee would be making the rounds, and in one room that contained dozens of sick mice, the committee did not even notice that the cards had recommended euthanasia for some of the mice as far back as two months earlier! The National Institutes of Health (NIH) never conducts  physical inspections of labs even though it doles out millions of taxpayer dollars to them. Believe me, the experimenters know that they can get away with almost anything. These animals have no protection from cruel treatment because mice and rats (and birds) are not covered by the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), thanks to a bad and arbitrary policy decision made years ago by the USDA. The original intent of Congress was to protect these species, but in early 2002, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to the Farm Bill that would forever deny them coverage under the AWA. The bill and amendment were both passed despite the outcry from PETA, animal protectionists and even some experimenters.
I went as far at UNC as I could with my complaints about the negligence and cruelty that I had witnessed (I informed my supervisors who shook their heads and said, “I know, I know—that’s unacceptable,” but did nothing about it), all the way to the Institutional Animal Care and Use  Committee with formal written complaints that were never answered. Now PETA has filed a complaint, including 59 videotapes, with NIH because it gives UNC hundreds of millions of dollars every year to experiment on mice and rats. We also went to the media with our evidence. Embarrassed by the publicity, the university has ordered one of the experimenters that I documented on videotape not to work with animals pending its own investigation.
In your mind’s eye, reduce a dog’s size until he or she is small enough to run around inside a shoebox. The animal is still a dog and still feels pain—and not any less pain just because of the tiny size. Imagine if you walked into a laboratory one morning and found 22 of those tiny dogs dead. This is the situation that I faced many times with the little animals I grew to know and love.
They’re not “just” mice and rats, they’re victims of a mindset—one that I myself had not long ago—that keeps the mouse and rat factories churning them out by the hundreds of thousands and the researchers using them.
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You Can Help
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 Please help us end these cruel experiments permanently
• Ask Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson to review NIH’s investigation into UNC’s animal neglect and cruelty and the experimenters’ deception.
The Honorable Tommy G. Thompson
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
200 Independence Ave. S.W.
Washington, DC 20201
• Contact your senators and congressional representatives and ask them how they voted on the Farm Bill and the amendment excluding mice and rats from the Animal Welfare Act. Tell them that you believe these animals deserve protection, and thank them if they voted against it. If they voted for it, tell them how disappointed you are.
• For more informationon this case, go to StopAnimalTests.com.
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physical inspections of labs even though it doles out millions of taxpayer dollars to them. Believe me, the experimenters know that they can get away with almost anything. These animals have no protection from cruel treatment because mice and rats (and birds) are not covered by the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), thanks to a bad and arbitrary policy decision made years ago by the USDA. The original intent of Congress was to protect these species, but in early 2002, North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to the Farm Bill that would forever deny them coverage under the AWA. The bill and amendment were both passed despite the outcry from PETA, animal protectionists and even some experimenters.
Committee with formal written complaints that were never answered. Now PETA has filed a complaint, including 59 videotapes, with NIH because it gives UNC hundreds of millions of dollars every year to experiment on mice and rats. We also went to the media with our evidence. Embarrassed by the publicity, the university has ordered one of the experimenters that I documented on videotape not to work with animals pending its own investigation.
