Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

sciencehistory.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 175 posts

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#121

Post by h2odragon »

hanoz wrote: post #110
h2odragon wrote: post #49

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…

Why hot water? I would have thought cold or preferably lukewarm water would be more humane.

Fast and doesn't damage the mouse as snake food. If the water is hot enough the shock kills them very quickly.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#122

Post by otherme123 »

Brybry wrote: post #112
albrewer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not suffocate them with nitrogen or co2 or something?

Everyone agrees drowning is really not humane but nitrogen isn't approved either (rodents are not humans and so they might react to things like inert gas hypoxia differently). CO2 is common in labs though lab rats/mice do show aversion to CO2 which is interpreted to mean that it causes distress. So there's been ongoing debate for 20+ years over how humane CO2 is and what the correct flow rate should be and if oxygen…

20 years ago I worked in a place that killed them with acetone, covering the mice with a lab paper then wetting the paper with about 50 ml acetone per 50 animals and closing the lid. It was fast.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#123

Post by starwind »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #100
h2odragon wrote: post #49

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…

Once in grad school I went to a talk where another grad student was presenting on his fear research with mice. Many powerpoint details unfold of the hell he and his advisor had contrived to make the mice chronically afraid, and to be able to quantify the fear induced and its effects. I learned that when mice get scared enough they shit excessively. In the presentation of results he lingers on a graph, and says, for e…

There have been a couple times where I've said something like "I'm sorry, I'm not seeing what's so funny here" when people are laughing about something serious. You can either look like a humorless dick or you people snap out of it and then respect you for acting like an adult

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#124

Post by tgarv »

badRNG wrote: post #87
jklinger410 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not vegan but I think about it all the time.

Same boat. I'm not a vegan, and I try my absolute best to avoid thinking about what we put animals through. It certainly sits in a specific category of intrusive thoughts. The only real analog to this in my mind is being aware of my own mortality; I just avoid that thought and shove it out of my mind. Occasionally my comparatively relaxed life is harshly interrupted by an awareness of these facts and I'm ripped back…

Why try your absolute best to not think about it, instead of taking some steps to reduce your animal consumption and actually feel better about it? I get that something like mortality is an intrusive thought that you can do nothing about, but it's pretty easy to take steps to reduce meat consumption and actually feel better about it.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#125

Post by rossdavidh »

tonmoy wrote: post #108
rossdavidh wrote: post #61

It would seem like the more obvious lesson would be, "when in conditions very different from what that species evolved for, new and often serious problems will arise". Which is, no doubt, true and even relevant. But, since we evolved for conditions very different than rats did, I'm not sure how much more can be concluded. It does point out, though, the importance of being skeptical of any other scientific study done…

What was surprising is that the mice didn’t end up evolving some traits and instincts optimized for the new conditions. I would’ve thought they would learn new behavior after a few generations to thrive in the new environment. This makes me think that a post scarcity environment may not be enough to ensure the survival of a species

Not sure, but it occurs to me that some lab animals have reduced genetic diversity compared to wild types of the same species. Sometimes this is by design, to reduce variation, sometimes just because the way the lab animals are bred happens to make a few of them the ancestors of the general population (especially if you're buying all your lab mice from the same place).

So, they might have had a better chance of evolving behavior more optimized to the situation, if they had more genetic diversity to work with. Just an hypothesis.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#126

Post by oh-4-fucks-sake »

osigurdson wrote: post #80

>> a 4½-foot cube—with everything a mouse could ever desire They likely desired a larger cube.

One step further: they needed a larger cube. Seems like the study reasoned that providing unlimited food/water ruled out "resource scarcity" as a cause for decline. Space is very much a resource.

It's no different than the naïve reasoning around government-run housing projects: "You have food, water, and a tiny space to live crammed among 1000s of other people--what more could you need"? Didn't this spawn aberrant, violent, unhealthy behavior too? Wasn't (at least in theory) part of the solution to stop doing ultra-ultra-high-density housing? (Given, it's not like the government executed on re-housing all the project-tenants into lower-density housing--they often simply dumped them back into the streets.)

TL;DR: It's mostly obvious why ultra-high-density projects (and prisons, and concentration camps, and slums) set people up for failure; 256 tiny nests in a 4.5ft cube sounds a whole like a housing project.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#127

Post by bnralt »

barry-cotter wrote: post #23

Has this ever been replicated? Were detailed enough records kept that we be sure this happened more or less as described or is it one of the famous experiments that were at best described in a completely misleading way, like the Zimnbardo Stanford prison experiment, or wildly and willfully misinterpreted, like the murder of Kitty Genovese?

You can add the Robber's Cave experiment and The Third Wave (which seems to be mostly fictional) to that list as well. After WWII, there seems to have been a certain desire among some people to show that the average human (or rodent, here) could quickly be turned evil given the right circumstances, and a number of charlatans popped up who were more than happy to manipulate things in order to feed this desire.

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#128

Post by hackflip »

johnsimer wrote: post #118
h2odragon wrote: post #49

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…

Swap out the researchers with AGI/ASI robots and swap out the mice with humans, and you can see one of the many scenarios that cause people to be concerned about AGI safety.

Almost all of science fiction is "what if aliens/robots did to us what we do to other animals".

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#129

Post by [deleted] »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #120
weberer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. Are you angry that he performed those fear studies, or just that he made a joke about it in the presentation? If you see the importance of the results gained from the former, you should have no problem with the latter. Scientists need a way to cope with their emotions as well.

I'm angry because if we agree that that work was important (not sure I do, but not the issue), then the sacrifice of basically torturing a bunch of animals to death in service of science should be treated soberly, with reverence. I'm kind of baffled that you think that I, or anyone, should have no problems with the described conduct. A surgeon, while operating with all diligence and conscientiousness, may from time t…

[deleted]

Re: Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

#130

Post by pessimizer »

h2odragon wrote: post #49

One of the worst jobs i ever had, occasionally required us to drown some mice. Excess population / euthanized "feeders" for pet snakes. The method was to put several mice into a small wire cage, and then submerge the cage in water. Usually I filled a bucket with hot water, beforehand, and made this operation fast as possible. Dunk and done. One day I came across a cow orker attempting to do this job (I had been busy…

> I had to adopt her and her baby after seeing that. They were never exceptional as pet mice but I still feel good about saving those two.

Weird sentiment. It's like when South American paramilitaries would exterminate entire villages, but adopt one of the children. Does that make it easier to go back to killing them, or harder?

edit: I could see it both ways; harder obviously, because you enjoy your pet and you see the other mice the same way you see your pet. But maybe easier, because that mouse earned life by acting in a way you registered as humanlike compassion, and the others failed to, so deserve their fate.

Post reply on HN