- One research technician responsible for providing the animals used in his laboratory with colyte (the only liquid they had to drink) was extremely negligent in his duties and indifferent to their suffering. Day after day, week after week, and month after month, our investigator cajoled and pleaded with him to provide the animals with sufficient liquids. Despite her efforts, she was forced to take time from her schedule to provide the animals with liquids, even though she was chided and even reprimanded by management for spending too much time on the animals assigned to her.
- Other animal care technicians were also forced to do the work of this research technician, who signed off on the food/water log only once for the entire month of October.
- When presented with water, thirsty and dehydrated rats and mice used in these and other alcohol studies would become frenzied, often fighting to be the first to drink. On one occasion, our investigator witnessed rats, standing on their hind legs to reach the water, drink for so long that they reached out their arms to each other for balance.
- Numerous alcohol experiments are conducted at UNC’s Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, including several in which rats receive, as their only sustenance, a liquid diet consisting of alcohol, sucrose water, and some nutrients for two weeks or more.
- A researcher told our investigator that under normal circumstances, rats wouldn’t drink alcohol, which is why it was mixed in with their food (i.e., sucrose water), the instinct to survive forcing the rats to ingest substances that they would never otherwise consume. The researcher’s opinion was that the rats to feel sorry for were the “control” rats (on the straight sucrose water diet) because they could feel the pangs of hunger, whereas, in the researcher’s opinion, the others (on the sucrose/ethanol diet) were too drunk to notice.
- However, even drunk, the rats were so hungry that they took to eating their own feces and, quite possibly, their bedding. It was hypothesized by the researcher that a rat discovered by our investigator emaciated and foaming at the mouth got drunk, ate his bedding, and choked when it became wet and swelled in his trachea or esophagus.
Mice used in a similar experiment suffered the deleterious effects of a “liquid diet” as well, suffering chronic diarrhea and severe weight loss. When our investigator expressed concern at finding dozens of emaciated mice, a research assistant said that that was expected and that their condition was considered “normal.” The research assistant told PETA’s investigator, “If he dies, he dies,” when looking at one of these afflicted mice in the study. That mouse did die and so did quite a few others in the study. Nearly all the mice suffered “raw anal areas” with many “oozing a clear, pus-like substance.” (Our investigator later documented the fact that an assistant to the researcher conducting this study was replacing the cage cards that identified her boss as the researcher with those of another. According to the assistant, because her boss’s protocol was not approved for the ethanol study, cards belonging to a researcher authorized to conduct these types of experiments were placed on the cages instead. The cards were switched after a member of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), who had paid a visit to the laboratory the day before, expressed to the assistant her displeasure with this serious violation of IACUC policy. After complaining about the incident, our investigator received an e-mail message from the chair of the IACUC stating, “Dr. Breese [the researcher in question] was not the offender … the technician had placed the wrong cards on the animal cages.” This was clearly not the case but rather the explanation that they had concocted.)
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