Cephalopods have complex bodies, unusual genetics, impressive spatial skills and intelligent minds. In 2010, the European Union gave cephalopods the same protections as vertebrate lab animals. Canada has similar rules. The United States does not.
BEN GUARINO: ‘Close relatives of squids, flamboyant cuttlefish are camouflage experts that can dramatically alter their skin textures and colors. Biologists who study this feature at the Marine Biological Laboratory put cuttlefish into a circular tank filled with black and white pebbles… In a cavernous laboratory, scientists are raising thousands of octopuses, cuttlefish and their kin as part of the Cephalopod Program, a three-year-old initiative to transform these sea creatures into the next lab animals. Cephalopods ooze scientific appeal: They have complex bodies, unusual genetics, impressive spatial skills and intelligent minds.
Yet the animals can be reluctant to breed, hard to raise and difficult to keep from escaping their tanks. Few laboratory protocols – and, in the United States, no legal regulations – offer guidance. Cephalopods “are considered the most alien form on the planet, the only invertebrate capable of higher-order cognitive tasks,” said squid expert Erica Vidal, a marine scientist at the Federal University of Parana in Brazil and a former president of the research organization the Cephalopod International Advisory Council…
In 2010, the European Union gave cephalopods the same protections as vertebrate lab animals. Canada has similar rules. The United States does not. Neither the Animal Welfare Act nor the National Research Council’s guide to lab animals covers invertebrates. At the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, cephalopods are treated under protocols developed for mice. Its animal ethics committee is developing specific rules for cephalopods, Dolen said.”These experiments are indefensible, curiosity-driven nonsense . . . . The best way to understand and treat human disorders is to study humans, but that would be inconvenient,” wrote PETA’s science adviser, Julia Baines, in an unsolicited email to The Washington Post’. SOURCE…
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