These cone things are for rats and mice. When you put them into a tunnel shaped object, their instinct is to crawl forward. So they crawl all the way up, and their face sticks out the other end so they can breathe. You close up the bag/tunnel behind them with your hand, then you can flip them over and inject them with what ever your are testing. For those that never worked with animals, or just don’t have the dexterity to scruff the neck and grab the tail with one hand, this is a godsend. I also used these at the end of my experiments to decapitate my rats so I could harvest their brains to test that tissue for stuff. (I had to decapitate without anesthesia because we were studying phosphorylation of proteins in the brain, and most anesthesia absolutely fucks with that shit on its own.) I still have trauma from that work 15 years later.
On a slightly brighter note, we recently got some rescue rats and introduced them to ours in the bathtub. The soft cage kind of collapsed and one of them decided she must squeeze into the flattened part. Now I understand why.
Yeah, there was one day I had a cohort of 50 animals that need to be harvested. Halfway through I had to take a break to throw up, and powering through to finish the rest of the group just had me dry heaving the entire time. I’m a Buddhist, I had not signed up for that originally, but sometimes the research leads places you didn’t expect to go. Finishing my postdoc and leaving that research was a happy day for me.
These cone things are for rats and mice. When you put them into a tunnel shaped object, their instinct is to crawl forward. So they crawl all the way up, and their face sticks out the other end so they can breathe. You close up the bag/tunnel behind them with your hand, then you can flip them over and inject them with what ever your are testing. For those that never worked with animals, or just don’t have the dexterity to scruff the neck and grab the tail with one hand, this is a godsend. I also used these at the end of my experiments to decapitate my rats so I could harvest their brains to test that tissue for stuff. (I had to decapitate without anesthesia because we were studying phosphorylation of proteins in the brain, and most anesthesia absolutely fucks with that shit on its own.) I still have trauma from that work 15 years later.
On a slightly brighter note, we recently got some rescue rats and introduced them to ours in the bathtub. The soft cage kind of collapsed and one of them decided she must squeeze into the flattened part. Now I understand why.
Also sorry for the horrible shit you had to do.
What a cutie! Rats are such social creatures, smart and make great pets.
:(
I know animal testing is a necessary evil to make medicine for both humans and animals/pets, but damn that’s brutal.
Hope they live out their cheese filled rat dreams in the afterlife.
Yeah, there was one day I had a cohort of 50 animals that need to be harvested. Halfway through I had to take a break to throw up, and powering through to finish the rest of the group just had me dry heaving the entire time. I’m a Buddhist, I had not signed up for that originally, but sometimes the research leads places you didn’t expect to go. Finishing my postdoc and leaving that research was a happy day for me.