Michael Slusher's book 'They All Had Eyes' has an acknowledgement page that begins like this: 'This book is dedicated to the many animals whom I tortured and killed in the name of science. If there is a hell, I will spend it forever looking into their eyes'. Slusher was a nerdy young 22 year old in 1985, struggling to find work after battling substance abuse issues. He found it at a research company called Applied Lipids, working with the lab rats and doing data entry. The waste, the suffering, and the lack of results is a constant theme of his book, as Slusher moves from Applied Lipids to different animal research jobs. But Slusher has flashes of empathy throughout his journey. One day, after staring deep into the eyes of a farmed animal, he decided to give up meat. Before he knew it, he was super public about his veganism and did his version of the Moby, getting 'vegan' tattooed on his wrist.
DREW HOUSMAN: ‘They All Had Eyes’ by Michael Slusher is a book that has an acknowledgements page that begins like this: ‘This book is dedicated to the many animals whom I tortured and killed in the name of science. If there is a hell, I will spend it forever looking into their eyes’…
Michael Slusher was a nerdy young 22 year old in 1985, struggling to find work after battling substance abuse issues. He found work at a research company called Applied Lipids, working with the lab rats and doing data entry.
Applied Lipids was like the Portlandia “put a bird on it” sketch but for using lipids in drug delivery. Some higher up would say, “Hey, you know how ibuprofen is good for pain relief but causes ulcers? What if we… put a lipid on it?!”
Then Slusher and the rest of the lab would have to give a bunch of rats painkillers to make them get ulcers so they could see if a liposomal delivery method helped.
Slusher provides exquisitely detailed and truly disgusting descriptions of what it was like to cut out ulcerated rat intestines so that he could count and measure the lesions. Many of the animals didn’t even need to be killed at the end of the experiment. Instead, they died from “massive internal bleeding into their gut from their perforated intestines.” This research never went anywhere and was ultimately scrapped.
Slusher, a lifelong animal lover, quickly got comfortable with handling, injecting, weighing, killing, and dissecting the rats. Later, he would become a pro at corralling angry monkeys, drugging them, and preparing them for surgery, and dissecting them. The book reads more like a training manual than a memoir at points. It includes page after page discussing how he went about sedating a monkey, shaving its legs, finding the vein, inserting a catheter, injecting pentobarbital to kill it, cutting out its tongue, cracking its femur, removing its eyeballs…
The waste, the suffering, and the lack of results is a constant theme as Slusher moves from Applied Lipids to different animal research jobs, including one at a large public university…
Slusher has flashes of empathy throughout his journey. A poignant one was when he wrote of how he liked to sit and listen to the rats playing in the dark before he started work… But he just keeps on going until he moves across the country for his wife’s job. Inertia is a son of a bitch.
After the move he found himself in a location with no animal research jobs available. Stepping out of that day to day seems to have allowed him some breathing room to reassess his life choices. He started raising a few animals of his own (alpacas, sheep, and chickens) and all of a sudden started feeling guilty about eating meat, given he loved his own animals so dearly…
One day, after staring deep into the eyes of his livestock, he decided to go vegetarian. He gave up one type of meat after another before it dawned on him that he could just give it all up in one fell swoop. After “a couple hours of research online” he realized that he could meet his dietary needs being vegan, and that was that. Before he knew it he was super public about his veganism and did his version of the Moby, getting “vegan” tattooed on his wrist…
Slusher’s newfound empathy and kindness shines throughout, and… is a great testament to the fact that people doing cruel things are capable of dramatic and positive changes, something that’s always worth remembering. SOURCE…
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