L ook around: at the elderly woman on the bus dependent on a pacemaker, at the newly developed pain medications lining the drugstore shelves, at the five-star crash-tested guarantee on your General Motors car. These were made possible by animal testing. They all come back to the hundreds of thousands of rats, mice, rabbits, cats and dogs sequestered in dark corridors of universities – like Washington State University and University of Washington – and corporations – like Avon and General Motors – across the United States.

Similar to my own animals – the rats and mice I care for as an animal facilities caregiver at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. – these millions of animals (in more than 10,000 research facilities) are sacrificed to gain new knowledge, or simply to teach college students basic anatomy.

As a biology major, I fully understand the excitement and possibility experiments involving animals provide, but that never seems to counter the instinctive shock I feel after finding rats I’ve raised since birth stacked lifelessly and neatly in the freezer or trembling in blood-spattered cages after undergoing neurological implant surgery.

Across the country, growing legal scrutiny is enveloping animal experimentation and the practices it condones. Since the Animal Welfare Act of 1992, enforcement of animal care standards has increased dramatically, placing universities and corporations under closer examination. Currently, the University of Nevada at Reno, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, the University of California at San Francisco and the University of Connecticut, among others, are facing charges regarding their inadequate care and abuse of animals involved in their research programs.

At Macalester, students and professors use 200 to 300 lab animals a year in experiments that can loosely be divided into three subsets: behavioral conditioning, dissection and training and new research. Each animal can be used in three different studies or experiments, providing they do not overlap. The majority of this work provides no new knowledge – it simply repeats basic maze conditioning, lever operating conditioning and dissections for new groups of students.

The new research involves the discovery and dosing of new pain medications – currently scopolamine – and typically uses about 80 rats per year. On paper, this sounds reasonable, responsible and rational; it’s not an emotional issue, but simply an issue of reaching overall set objectives.

But for me it is emotional. Just three weeks ago, I held an infinitely delicate, endearing, squirming red baby rat in the palm of my hand. That baby, now classified as part of an experiment, will spend its entire lifespan (sometimes less than a year) in the small, windowless rooms of our isolated animal care facilities. Seeing the innocence and vulnerability of these pups, completely at the mercy of our power, underscores the question of morality involving animal testing.

According to the American Association of Lab Animal Facilities (AALAS), animal rights do not exist, only the idea of animal welfare. By this definition, it is acceptable to expose animals to severe and chronic pain for a prolonged period of time.

The benefits of animal research, powerful though they are, cannot be our only criteria: the ends do not justify the means. Unnoticed and unappreciated by the general public, lab animals are the silent slaves behind contemporary scientific developments.

There do exist other avenues of research besides the use of animals. According to European experts from EuropaBio and various pharmaceutical industries, the use of biotechnology (genomics and proteomics) provides an alternative to animal experimentation without decreasing scientific benefits. Experiments involving cancer, Alzheimer’s, smallpox and cholesterol buildup have already been completed successfully.

In America, however, we rely primarily on animal research, a fact highly protested by groups such as Last Chance For Animals and American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

It is vital that research institutions both incorporate new technologies and observe the laws enacted by the Animal Welfare Act. Universities like WSU and UW, as well as Macalester, need to follow through on their responsibilities to these living animals they take for granted. To forget, obscure or ignore these animals we sacrifice would be a terrible mistake on our part, especially when there are other options available.

Take the time to reconsider the question of animal rights and of animal experimentation, to look beyond the current way of doing research to new technological opportunities. And don’t forget them – don’t forget the millions of animals behind new beauty products, behind new medications, behind the minute accessories of our daily lives.