unnecessary. Supporters of expanding the AWA argue that, “if research institutions are already providing humane care to their mice, birds, and rats, application of the USDA regulations would not be burdensome” (Fishbein 2). This thought process that a law change would not negatively affect the researchers, is completely false because researchers would be inhibited immensely by these additional laws.
Money is what everyone needs in research, yet there is very little of it. Hence, it would be
unfair to tie a laboratory's research funding to adherence to laws protecting mice, rats, and birds. While interviewing for the research position, my supervisor gave me a tour of the laboratory where I would be working. At one point, he showed me a 1.5 million dollar microscope, which I recently realized I could pay for my college education approximately 75 times if tuition remains $20,000 a year. The moral of the story: research is expensive. The majority of scientists receive government supplied grants, or grants from outside sources. Pharmaceutical companies pay millions to develop one drug, and with current economic standing, these millions are less available. Implementation of additional requirements would lead to enormous costs for researchers. For example, new legislation would demand recorded accounts of the numbers of mice, rats, and birds bred. This task is reasonable when studying primates, which produce only a few offspring at a time, but insurmountable when considering mice. Mice breed rapidly, and in 2001 the estimated number of mice used in laboratories was 25 million. The number has risen since due to the increased use of genetically modified mice (Fishbein 2). These new records would need to be kept organized, and would be taken frequently. Hence, funding would no longer be used for research itself but for useless record keeping, which benefits neither the researcher nor the animals. Therefore, because of the new standards under the AWA, increased funding for research projects would be necessary. Inevitably, certain research institutions would close due to lack of monetary resource.
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First-Year Writing 2010