Opinion: It’s time to do away with animal experimentation at Macalester College

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Fifty years ago, we were freshmen at Macalester College in St. Paul. It was the heyday of Harvard behaviorist B.F. Skinner and his notion that behavior was basically the sum of the rewards and punishments that had shaped us. As a student in introductory psychology, one of us (Neal) was given a rat to be put into a metal “Skinner box.” If the rat pressed a bar, she got a drink, and the rat worked hard for her water reward.

What the psychology students did not see is that, behind closed doors, I (Clark) was the work-study student who had to deprive the animals of water for prolonged periods so they would “perform.” I didn‘t like that job, especially because, when the experiments were done, I was assigned to drop the rats into a trash can, one on top of another, pour poison over the struggling animals and close the lid. Killing small animals was not what I’d signed up for, and I quit.

It was all unnecessary. Psychologists soon found that students learn just as well from a textbook, film or lecture, or by engaging each other as behavioral subjects in classroom exercises.

Meanwhile, Jane Goodall and others revolutionized our understanding of animals. Rather than being comic, cuddly and childlike, chimpanzees are complex individuals with needs, desires and family bonds. From crows to bees, researchers documented the complexity of countless other species, including even octopuses, as graphically shown in the 2020 film “My Octopus Teacher.” Rats, it turns out, are no exception. They have emotions and interests of their own, and they too suffer in the laboratory environment.

After graduation, I (Neal) went to medical school, where dogs were used to demonstrate the effects of common drugs — something we had already learned from lectures. This time, I refused to participate in experiments and, later on, I worked with medical colleagues to replace the use of animals in medical schools with other methods. Today, no American medical school uses live animals in teaching.

Over time, society has developed a heart for animals of all kinds, as we learned from a 2024 poll showing that 85% of Americans would like to see the end of animal experimentation. It has also developed laws to protect them. Under federal guidelines, if there are alternatives to using animals, experimenters are to leave the animals in peace.

In 2015, Harvard closed its primate laboratory, and experiments on chimpanzees ended throughout the United States. Skinner’s metal boxes ended up in Harvard’s dumpster. The same thing happened in the psychology labs at Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Duke, Penn and elsewhere.

Preparing for our 50th college reunion in June, we were surprised to find that, despite the findings of Goodall and others, and unlike the Ivy League, Macalester still has rats and Skinner boxes. Apart from the animal deaths, the laboratory exercises also kill that part of the student’s ethical sense that calls for compassion, even for beings we may not fully understand. It seemed that this once-great institution, where Hubert Humphrey taught and Walter Mondale and Kofi Annan studied, teaches students that animals are “tools” and that science and compassion are incompatible.

That needs to change — at Macalester and every other school that is not yet up to date on science, animals and ethics.

It will change, we are sure. Because if there is one thing we learned as a student at Mac, it’s the importance of openness to new ways of thinking. When Macalester decides to apply that openness to science, it will not only teach modern psychology, but it will transmit more important lessons about the world we live in and the animals we share it with.

Clark Gustafson lives in Owatonna. Dr. Neal Barnard lives in the Washington, D.C., area. Earlier this month Barnard 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.