• Question: do you harm any animals at you work

    Asked by nile1 to Thomas, Thad, Emily, Adam on 10 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Adam Milligan

      Adam Milligan answered on 10 Mar 2015:


      No, never! I do what is called ‘observational’ study where I just watch them! Sometimes I get to play with them by giving them toys and things but nothing I do ever hurts them and I will never be involved in that kind of thing!

      In fact, my current work is trying to find out ways of making sure animals, including pets, don’t suffer.

    • Photo: Thomas Clements

      Thomas Clements answered on 10 Mar 2015:


      Hi nile1,

      Good question! I do a lot of experiments using animals, but all of them are already dead. We tend to choose animals for our experiments that are eaten by humans, so we don’t have to kill them.

      I have worked with colleagues that work on worms (for example). We do have to kill these, so we have to use very humane techniques such as giving them an anesthetic that puts them to sleep before dosing them with chemicals that will kill them very quickly.

      All experiments have to be carried out within the law which is very strict regarding how you do it. As a rule, we do not work on vertebrates (animals with backbones) in our labs.

      Hope this answers your question.

    • Photo: Emily Seward

      Emily Seward answered on 10 Mar 2015:


      No, at the moment my work is purely computational.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 11 Mar 2015:


      I’ve never intentionally harmed an animal as part of my work. Accidents can happen – like when a friend of mine stepped on a tadpole – unpleasantly squishy!

      But sometimes when you work as a conservation scientist you find animal species in areas where they shouldn’t be. Because the other animals and plants in the area aren’t used to having that species around the ‘invasive’ species can cause a lot of damage. For example rats quite often cause chaos when they get onto islands by stowing away on boats. The rats eat the eggs of ground-nesting birds who aren’t used to protecting their nests from hungry rats and this can cause whole species to die out.

      This means we have to think very carefully about whether we have to remove that particular animal from the area. That can involve killing animals, which is very tough for people who choose to work in conservation science because they love wildlife! But I know that the people who do end up having to remove animals from an area follow careful guidelines to make sure that the animals suffer as little as possible – and sometimes they don’t kill any of the animals at all – there was one project where 5000 hedgehogs were airlifted off some islands on the Scottish coast instead!

    • Photo: Thaddeus Aid

      Thaddeus Aid answered on 11 Mar 2015:


      I don’t study animals, I study humans, and I do it with a computer. So no animals are harmed in my work.

      The people that provided the DNA that I work on did have to collect blood from 1092 people around the world however, so some humans had to have a needle put into their arms to extract the blood, but that doesn’t hurt very much and only a little blood is needed 🙁

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