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Tons of mice die needlessly for health testing. Thanks, science  »

It’s no secret that loads of mice (literally hundreds of thousands) have been sacrificed to science for “research” purposes to help cure all kinds of human ailments. This has always been a tricky subject for vegans, because, you know, it’s medical ethics, duh. But it turns out that a new study recently reported in the New York Times suggests that all those mice very likely died in vain.

The bottom line of the study is that billions of dollars have been wasted and, like, mice cancer and heart disease is different from people cancer and heart disease. I know the precautionary principle is a moot point when it comes to mice when you’re a big fancy scientist being backed by a big fancy drug company, but I strongly believe that we shouldn’t just kill mice before we’re, you know, sure about this stuff. And it turns out people weren’t. At all. And now those mice are looking down on us from mouse heaven except there is no mouse heaven and oh I’m crying now so just excuse me while I leave out some peanut butter for the neighbors’ mice.

[Photo by Andrew via Flickr]

Baddass mouse is totally baddass  »

This is the grasshopper mouse, a carnivorous rodent found in Southwestern U.S. deserts. These wacky mofos are totally hardcore! They eat scorpions and howl at the moon. For real. And forget about digging their own burrows—they run up in other rodents’ homes and kick them out. And if times are tough, cannibalism is not beyond them. Damn, mouse, that’s some cold shit. This video is ridic:

[Can’t see the video? Watch it on Vegansaurus.com!]

OMG I want one! Why are they so crazy? National Geographic has another vid if you don’t mind some bug carnage. These baddasses don’t mess around. But remember: “Thug means never having to say you’re sorry.”

PS: you have to watch this. 

Life as a lab animal is the worst: Thousands of NYU’s test rodents drowned this week  »

Despite being “one of the largest and most valuable [collection of carefully bred rodents] of its kind in the country,” the thousands of mice and rats living in a cellar in New York University’s Smilow Research Center drowned in the Sandy-related flooding that began on Monday night. The New York Times reports that while most of the test-subject animals housed at the Smilow Center were rescued, workers could not save something like 10,000 rats and mice.

But don’t worry:

Already scientists at two research centers, the University of Pennsylvania and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, have pledged to donate animals to restart some of the Smilow center’s colonies. “That’s the one really positive thing to come out of this,” Dr. Fishell said. “Individuals in the research community, who in most businesses would be considered my competitors, have been eager to help.”

Phew! I know I’m relieved our scientists can get back to torturing those animals in the name of humanity ASAP.

[Photo by Pockafwye via Flickr]