The Case for Free-Range Lab Mice

🧵 A thread based on my @NewYorker story🧵

newyorker.com/culture/annals… No-one knows how many mice & rats are experimented on in the US, bc even tho' they are the most common species used in biomedicine, thanks to Sen. Jesse Helms, rodents are officially excluded from the Animal Welfare Act.

It’s estimated @ 120 million/yr.

tinyurl.com/47awxv4s

My latest for @NYTMag--on the under-covered phenom of "spillback," by which human pathogens cross the species barrier into the non-human world--is out!

tinyurl.com/3vs4mmr6 To write it, I spent >6 months following #SARSCoV2 as it radiated from humans into non-human animals.

Which drew me into the strange & secretive world of the modern fur trade: a $20 billion industry that traffics in the skins of carnivorous mammals.

tinyurl.com/3vs4mmr6

Last night on "All Things Considered," a guy from FAIR, an anti-migrant hate group founded by a white supremacist, said that the people subject to the #PublicChargeRule "weren't objectively assessed on their self-reliance but rather their bloodline."

npr.org/2019/08/12/750… His language reminded me of early 20th-century eugenicists.

He went on: "So a lot of these people coming in without a - an economic reason, an employment opportunity, they're a recipe for financial disaster. They're going to cost us absolute billions of dollars."