Animal Experiments What I am about to tell you is absolutely true even though it sounds nuts. The University of Richmond, Virginia has a project which seems to be successful. They have succeeded in teaching rats to drive tiny cars. What is next teaching squirrels. It would be beneficial for them since it would them easier for them to escape being run over in their search for nuts and such. It seems to me this university has too much money. They claim they did this to studying learning skills. Are we really interested if rats can run custom built cars which just probably have a control or two, I know I am not? Animal research is necessary but sometimes it can be a waste of time if it goes too far. Apparently, the vehicle could only go left, right or straight. When the rats got it right, they were given Fruit Loops. I say if you want to know if a rat can drive a car put them into a Ford SUV. If they do that I would really be impressed. It is said the smartest animals are apes, elephants, crows and parrots. I wonder why dolphins are not being named? Anyway, there is a real push to find out how smart animals are. Why are we so interested in this area, would money be better spent looking for a cancer cure or something like that? One experiment was trying to find out if a squirrel can count to then. Who cares? There is no doubt squirrels have incredible memories because they can find most of the nuts they buried during the year. They are probably much better at this than we would be without a map. I read an article talking about how apes couldn’t recognize faces. It turned out they are good at that. The problem was they were being shown human faces and they didn’t do well, but they did when they were shown ape faces. If we were to give a human I.Q. test to an ape they probably would fail miserably. If we gave them one, they could understand about their lives they probably would do very well. There is a limit to all animal intelligence compared to us. Even the gorillas which were taught sign language while fairly good at talking would not do very well compared to us. This was easily proved when Koko was allowed to answer questions on the internet. This was conducted by having a sign language interpreter tell her the questions and then telling us what he said. The answers did not always make sense, even though some of them were pretty good. Why would we care how long a seal or sea lion can remember things and how do we know they simply don’t want to participate in the experiments? Scientists tell us they can only remember things for about 18 seconds. Could there be other reasons for this like being so smart they want to mess up the experiment? I wouldn’t blame them would you? They must hate being experimented on and maybe this is their way of stopping the experiments. It is almost as if scientists want to find out if animals are as smart as we are. This has caused animals to be subject to all sorts of unnecessary experiments. Some of them have been very cruel. Does it make an animal smarter if he can recognize food by smell or is it just a sense it has which we are lacking because our sense of smell isn’t as powerful? Elephants can tell how much food is available by using their sense of smell, so not only do they know what the food is but how much of it is there. Scientists decided to test African elephants to see if they could tell how many sunflower seeds were in a pile. It was more like they wanted to know not the exact amount but more like a little, a medium amount or a lot. What possible use could this experiment have? If we had noses four feet long maybe we could do the same thing. There are some animals which act as sentries for the rest of the pack and Meerkats use sentries. Scientists wanted to know why sentries were necessary. It turns out they were necessary because as the animals search for insects to eat they have to put their heads into the sand so this is why sentries were needed. It seems to me you could find this out by just watching them. Scientists then wanted to know why certain animals were picked as sentries. Why, what does this do for us? They conducted experiments at the University of Zurich. They even ranked different animals on their abilities to be sentries. Talk about a waste of money. When it comes to parrots most of us know they are very intelligent birds. Experiments to make them make decisions might seem to be interesting, but what is the result of all this testing? Birds are forced to decide if they want immediate food rewards or get a token for even better rewards later. The birds did figure out the token was the way to go which shows their intelligence, but at the end so what? What did this test cost? So far, I have not talked about the cruel tests some animals have been subjected to. Knowing how smart some of these animals are raising a question and that question is do smarter animals realize what is happening to them during the crueler tests? Cutting open live animals and not even giving them anesthesia and ripping them apart to study parts of their insides to figure out something related to cosmetics is beyond the pale. Monkeys were used and had terrible things put into their eyes to see what would happen. This was related to a cosmetic test. As you probably have noticed I am not big on animal testing even when it is not harmful to the subjects unless there is some benefit to humans. I often wonder if the nonsensical experiments didn’t take place how much money would be available for more serious test which could benefit our health. There is a difference between interesting and useful and unless an experiment has as its goal something useful, then why waste money on it. Look at all the money one has to pay to get into college while some of these colleges are spending millions of dollars on useless experimentation. It might be useful to know how much a particular college spends on experiments each year and what the experiment is for. That might help in lowering tuitions if a light is shown on these experiments.
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