It has been a long time since I’ve done any sort of science experiment with animals. I did once at MIT where all I had to do was draw blood from a rabbit’s ear. I couldn’t do it that well and the rabbits were pissed and I was not a happy researcher. I pretty much closed the books on doing any sort of animal research.
It usually takes a lot of money and trouble to keep animals for research which is why I was completely caught off guard when we did metabolic / oxygen consumption rates of gerbils at my local community college.
Here’s our gerbil. We named him Pip.
We put him in three different environments – room temperature, warm and cold environments to see how much oxygen Pip uses in these three situations. Poor Pip! So cold. Brrrr.
