I work at a place that has to do animal tests (mostly on mice and fish) to understand and cure diseases.<p>Colleagues working with animals tell me there's strict restrictions on conducting these tests, everything has to conform to animal protection laws and ethics requirements. If tests aren't deemed <i>necessary,</i> they won't be conducted.<p>This makes me wonder about the necessity and suffering/benefit ratio of "surgically plac[ing wireless accelerometers] on the rats", especially since the image processing already seems to provide insight.
Ever since I came across the post about how sheep rotate leaders in a herd, I’ve become befuddled with the parts of the scientific community who conduct these kind studies. How is something like this planned, proposed, funded, re-planned, etc. and for what cause?