Neuroscience Rats

To the Editors:

I am writing in regard to the vivisecting of rats in Oberlin neuroscience labs. Oberlin neuroscience majors are required to cut open the heads of rats and stick electrodes into their brains in order to stimulate certain parts of the brain. Not only is this disgustingly cruel, but it serves no legitimate purpose. The professors already know what’s going to happen when the electrodes are applied. The only reason to perform vivisection is to become practiced at manipulating other creatures’ brains. There is no legitimate use for this knowledge that could possibly justify the excessive cruelty visited on these rats. No one needs to perform a vivisection to learn about biology. There are plenty of ways to teach biology without such exploitation. All arguments for continuing to perform vivisection—as well as medical and cosmetic experimentation on animals—are based on a view of non-human animals as expendable objects to be held in captivity, tortured, experimented upon, and killed for our own purposes. It is extremely selfish, cruel, inhumane and unnecessary. The human race has lived for thousands of years without animal testing, and any “progress” that requires such cruelty is not worth acheiving. The ends DO NOT justify the means. Cruelty for the sake of science should not be acceptable to people. Animals are not tools. They are living, breathing, feeling creatures with the same desire to live freely as any human.

–Abe Duncanson
College sophomore