The research involves feeding slurry containing mice faecal matter to mice of different ages and observing how younger creatures function on a diet containing the poo of older ones and vice versa.
DAVID HANNANT: The University of East Anglia [UEA] has defended a research project which involved feeding mice their own faeces, after criticism from animal rights group PETA. The organisation wrote to the university regarding the study, which it described as “highly concerning”. The research involves feeding slurry containing mice faecal matter to mice of different ages and observing how younger creatures function on a diet containing the poo of older ones and vice versa. It is intended to investigate whether so-called ‘faecal transplants’ can reverse hallmarks of ageing in humans…
But in its letter to the researchers, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said: “There is an urgent need to modernise biomedical research away from the use of animals, with growing scientific consensus that far more is to be gained from enhanced support for human-relevant research methods and technology that are better suited to solving human biomedical and regulatory assessment paradigms than from reliance on animal studies… It is highly concerning that this study passed the university’s animal welfare ethical review board given the prevalence of human clinical data available for this nature of work”…
A spokesman for the UEA said: “We are committed to the ethical standards of animals in research and will only use animals when all other alternatives have been explored and exhausted to minimise their use as far as possible… UEA carries out animal research to further our understanding of diseases that have the most detrimental impact on human health and quality of life… the complexity of these systems cannot be replicated by using other techniques”. SOURCE…
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