Question: Could your work be considered as animal abuse?

Martha Havenith answered on 19 Jun 2015:

That honestly depends on how you define abuse. We do our very best to keep any pain or annoyance for the mice to a minimum. So it’s probably a lot less stress and pain than for example most farm animals have to go through. And to me, abuse comes down to ‘random violence’ – we only put animals through pain (in my case surgeries) if we see absolutely no other way. Sadly, right now there is no way to precisely record brain activity without surgeries. And that clearly cannot be done in humans. And given how many illnesses and also society problems (e.g. aggression) are down to the brain, we kind of need to understand it. However, that doesn’t change the fact that we do actively have to cause animals some pain sometimes, and animal rights groups for example would say that this is unjustified for whatever reason. I obviously disagree with that – I think that it’s basically impossible to live as a human (eat, use medicine, learn) without inflicting pain once in a while, and the trick is not to deny that, but to do it as ethically and lightly as possible.