Alum sues Macalester over animal cruelty concerns in lab experiments

A Macalester College alum and medical doctor who has spent decades trying to end the use of animals in scientific research says the St. Paul school is lying when it claims to use the highest ethical standards for animal welfare in its labs.

Dr. Neal Barnard, a Maryland resident, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Hennepin County District Court against Macalester, alleging it has misrepresented its program to the public by using live animals, mice and rats, in psychology class labs. He wants Macalester to either stop using animal labs when there’s an alternative method available or take down statements about following animal welfare standards and ethical rules from its website.

“To my shock and amazement, Macalester is stuck in out-of-date education, cruel animal experiments that are, astoundingly enough, more than 100 years old,” Barnard said in an interview. “I came to feel that the school is being fraudulent when it says it adheres to the highest standards — it just doesn’t."

In a statement Wednesday, Macalester said it didn’t hear of the lawsuit until after it was shared with the media.

“While we are unable to respond to the substance of a complaint we have not received, Macalester adheres strictly to all relevant federal regulations and well-accepted scientific and ethical standards for the care and use of animals,” the statement said.

“Our program involves a small number of mice and rats, and their use is overseen by an ethics committee with expertise in animal-care standards and techniques,” the school’s statement continued. “The college respects the academic expertise of our faculty in matters of pedagogy and scholarship. We strongly support academic freedom and do not allow external parties to interfere with or dictate our curriculum.”

Barnard’s claims are part of a broader movement in animal research; no U.S. or Canadian medical school uses animals in its curriculum anymore, though the schools may conduct other animal research, Barnard said.

He said he learned about Macalester’s current animal practices over the past two years when he got involved in fundraising and planning for his 50th class reunion this year. He wants the college to give back his $100 donation and is seeking a declaration that Macalester continues to violate Minnesota law by “making misrepresentations to the public” online about its animal use.

“My hope is to get them to clean up their act,” he said.

Macalester’s website says that “animal welfare standards and ethical principles are applied at the highest possible level in any animal use or research conducted at or in association with the college.’'

The lawsuit says Macalester also claims its ethical principles and standards for animal care “align with best practices” at other research institutions.

Macalester officials have confirmed that they’re still conducting animal experiments based on the work of a famous psychologist who invented a device called the “Skinner box” in the 1920s, the lawsuit said. Designed to study how animals, such as rats or birds, learn by being rewarded or punished for pushing a lever, the boxes are used to teach the concept of operant conditioning.

Animals are deprived of food or water beforehand and may receive a reward, like food pellets, or a punishment, like an electrical shock, for pushing the levers in Skinner box experiments.

Because it uses the devices, Barnard, who in 1985 founded a national nonprofit advocating for ethical and effective scientific research called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says that Macalester’s online statements about ethics aren’t true.

He has spoken with the psychology department chair, he said, who assured him that Macalester was “very careful” in its work with animals. He later met with Macalester President Suzanne Rivera. Barnard said he was initially hopeful things would change, but Rivera emailed him to say all future communications about animal use should go to the college’s legal counsel.

Barnard said he was a psychology major at Macalester in the 1970s when he first used the Skinner box, working with rats and pigeons. He was surprised when his friend told him behind-the-scenes details.

“He said, ‘You don’t know what goes on here,’” Barnard said.

It was that friend’s work-study job to deprive the animals of food and water. Later, when the experiments were through, he put all the rats in a trash can and covered them with something poisonous to kill them, possibly chloroform, Barnard said.

“I had to go in and snuff out all these guys,” said Clark Gustafson, who had the work-study job. “It really bothered me.”

In the lawsuit, Barnard said that, over many years of practicing as a psychiatrist — he’s worked in psychiatry wards, private practice and is now an adjunct faculty member at the George Washington University School of Medicine — he’s found that Skinner’s findings had “no relevance in any of these settings and were rarely, if ever, discussed in relation to any aspect of psychiatric treatment.”

Society’s view of animals and modern teaching methods have changed dramatically since the 1920s, Barnard said, citing Jane Goodall’s work that found “animals aren’t just blocks of wood” but have inner lives and interests. Psychotherapy and behavioral interventions have developed, the lawsuit said.

“If you can become a physician without experimenting on animals, surely you can be a good psychology student ... without reducing yourself to cruelty to small animals,” he said.

In the lawsuit, Barnard says using live animals, Skinner boxes and depriving animals of food or water and then killing them runs afoul of current ethical research guidelines. If there’s a way to teach a lesson without using animals, they shouldn’t be used, he said.

“And it’s pretty clear to me that nobody considered an alternative because, if they had considered it, they would have found it,” he said.

Barnard, who still plans to attend his reunion Friday, is putting up three billboards in the Twin Cities regarding the lawsuit claims.

“If [Macalester officials] go to court and say, ‘We have stopped all of this,’ the lawsuit will be mooted out,” Barnard said. “If they do anything else, they’ve got a fight on their hands.”