Animal Research: Then and Now

You may have noticed that we say very little about animal research in our text. That is strange because we both come from animal research backgrounds. Much has changed in animal research over the course of our careers. There is much less animal research going on in psychology than there was 40 years ago.

There are several reasons why animal research is less common now. The most obvious, perhaps, is the rise of the animal rights community, notably PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and similar groups. I attended the 1990 APA convention where PETA exhibited a float outside of the Washington Hilton Hotel depicting the horrors of animal research. At that same meeting, demonstrators disrupted presentations, including one by Neil Miller at which I was in the audience.

Another reason for the decline of animal research in psychology is money and still another is more outside regulation. The price of animals has risen as has the price of housing and caring for them. In addition, new regulations (which we cover in chapter 3) have made it more difficult to maintain existing animal facilities and nearly impossible to start new ones.

Sally Boysen's chimpanzee research is an apt example. (See this link to Scientific American Frontiers for more information.) Her research, valuable as it was, ended up a victim to costs, regulations, and more. Her university closed down the lab and sent the animals to Texas. Boysen chained herself to the door of the lab before the move, but that action, dramatic as it was, changed nothing. Here is a news story about the closing of her lab.

The impetus for this post, however, is an upcoming book: The Animal Research War by P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in May 2008. Here is a link to the publisher's page about that book. Here is an link to an excerpt, you may have to register (for free) before being allowed to read it. If you are interested in animal research, I recommend the excerpt highly.

All things change, including psychology. Animal behavioral research is still valuable, I think. Certainly, the assault from PETA and others forced changes too. Some of those changes were probably needed. For instance, undergraduates taking physiological psychology courses probably don't need to sacrifice and dissect a rat's brain in order to learn how brains work. Obviously, graduate students in physiological psychology do need to learn such techniques. The winds of change blow and we usually don't know what kinds of changes they will bring. Less animal research in psychology was one of them however.