Mad Scientists, Monkeys and Boiled Rabbits!

Not for the first time, an animal has been accidentally boiled alive in a research laboratory. This time it was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The horrific incident happened in January of this year, when an 11-year-veteran employee removed two rabbits from a cage but failed to remove the third before putting the cage through a high-temperature sanitizing machine.

This information is hard to understand. How does anyone FAIL to notice a rabbit in a cage? It's not a fruit fly! Ohio-based organization, Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! exposed the incident and is calling for the USDA to fine MIT's medical school. It is unfortunate the maximum fine allowed by the USDA per animal welfare violation is a paltry $10,000.

MIT's response was equally baffling. According to Reuters, a spokesperson from MIT stated that their "new" protocol would require TWO people to check the cages prior to any cage washing. One can only hope two idiots are better than one.

In a similar incident, Shin Nippon Biomedical Research Laboratories also appears to have blind employees. They left a healthy female macaque monkey in her cage and put the cage into a giant washer at their Everett, Washington lab in 2008, basically boiling her to death.

Intelligence is also apparently lacking at University of Wisconsin in Madison, where shameful maternal deprivation experiments using baby monkeys are still occurring. In order to study the neurobiology of fear and anxiety, Dr. Ned Kalin is taking baby monkeys away from their mothers at birth, keeping them in isolation and exposing them to highly traumatizing experiences, such as scaring them with a live kingsnake, in some kind of misguided attempt to understand human childhood traumas. When they reach about one year of age, the baby monkeys are then killed, and their brains dissected.

Perhaps you don't care about monkeys, but perhaps you care that Kalin's research has cost American taxpayers $5,075,798 over the past ten years. However, Kalin has, in fact, been conducting these ridiculous experiments for approximately 30 years, at great cost to taxpayers.

Maternal deprivation experiments have never and will never contribute to understanding human fear and anxiety disorders. Let's stop the madness!