4 Animals in Research Facilities

Prayer of the Mouse

I am so little and grey, dear God, how can You keep me

in mind? Always spied upon, always chased. Nobody ever

gives me anything, and I nibble meagrely at life. Why do

they reproach me with being a mouse? Who made me but

You? I only ask to stay hidden.

CARMEN BERNOS DE GASZTOLD, PRAYERS FROM THE ARK (196 9)

A

lthough most Americans know that large numbers of dogs

and cats died after Hurricane Katrina, few know that 8,000

animals at Louisiana State University’s Health Sciences

Center School of Medicine met the same fate. The animals dis-

cussed in this chapter received virtually no media attention. Those

who did not drown during the fl ood or starve in the weeks follow-

ing it were euthanized. In 1992, after Hurricane Andrew, several

hundred animals escaped from research facilities at the University

of Miami. Although the animals had been used in AIDS research,

they were “disease-free and harmless if left alone.”^1 Alarmed by

rumors that the animals carried HIV, area residents fatally shot 211

of them. At a nearby commercial breeding facility, 2,500 animals

escaped when Andrew fl attened gates and fences. Handlers said

most of the animals could not survive on their own.

In addition to these deaths from what we call “natural” disas-

ters, animals in research facilities suffer and die in human-caused

or “man-made” disasters, such as accidents and technological fail-

ures. In human terms, the threshold for qualifying as a man-made

disaster is twenty deaths or fi fty injured.^2 Yet, human error or tech-