Question: have you ever killed an animal ?

Juan Carlos Lopez-Baez answered on 10 Mar 2014:

Hi haron

Sadly, working with animals means that at some point you are going to have to kill some of them. Sometimes, some experiments require it, but other times you need to kill them because they are very sick or they are very old.

Unfortunately, some experiments require the use of animals. This is not something that scientists like to do and for that reason they try to minimise the number of animals that they use in their experiments. The Home Office (a big department inside the government) is in charge of limiting the use of animals in science. Before they approve the use of any animals, you need to convince them and two panels of experts (made from scientists and non-scientists) that your experiments are worth doing and that they cannot be done in any other way that does not use animals. They also carry out many surprise inspections a year to make sure that the animals are well looked after and are being treated in the best way possible.