Action Alert: Tips for Writing OSU Officials

Please ask Ohio State University to cancel the Spinal Cord Injury Training Course. When writing your letter, voice your objections firmly but politely. You may want to make the following points:

If this class goes forward, 269 rats and mice will be subjected to major surgery, forced to perform distressing behavioral tasks, and killed, simply to illustrate information that is already well known in the field of spinal cord injury animal modeling.
You will not support any activities of the Ohio State University until this class is cancelled. If you are an alumnus of the University, have children about to enter college, or have any other affiliations with OSU, be sure to let them know this.
Since recent research indicates that even routine laboratory procedures, such as blood collection, oral gavage, and handling, result in large stress increases, any animals involved in this course are certain to experience distress.
After surgery, the instructors propose to check for signs of pain twice per day, which is clearly inadequate.
The course constitutes poor instruction. Students should be taught research methods with close supervision of laboratory advisors, while forming their own research protocols and outcomes. They should be encouraged to “think outside the box” and develop their own research methods, instead of relying on animal experiments to determine their experimental design.
Clinicians and neurologists never place value on animal data, relying instead on clinical and epidemiological research to discover cutting-edge research and treatments.
Alternatives work better. Imaging tools such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can help us view pathological changes after spinal cord injury in humans. Other non-animal research techniques could include in vitro neural cell and tissue cultures.
There are crucial differences between rats and humans that make research using these techniques unlikely to have any meaningful outcome. These include the following:

o Rats have a four-legged gait.
o The rat spinal cord has an intrinsic neural mechanism that can maintain coordinated stepping movements in the absence of any supraspinal (higher brain) inputs. This might contribute to locomotion reported after spinal lesions in rats and other animals.
o Humans have a much greater dependence on supraspinal input than do rats for certain body functions.
o Compared with humans, rats recover very rapidly after spinal cord injury, and their recovery is more complete. It’s possible that, given sufficient time and training, rats might recover completely from injuries inflicted during research, which calls into question the recent advances reported in the field.

Thank you for your support. With the help of people like you, we can persuade OSU to halt this course, and prevent the suffering of hundreds of animals. Write to OSU President Karen Holbrook, and the State of Ohio Board of Regents. Tell them what you think!

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