How did the ethics committee decide what human-like behaviour is exactly? I assume they are not including animal behaviour that humans do (eating, sleeping, running, twitching our noses), or including normal mouse behaviour that can be seen as human (standing on hind legs, solving puzzles, grooming and parental relationships, eating human food, setting traps for cats)?
That was my question, too.
And there's this: would the researchers even notice that their animals were behaving differently, anyway?
I was talking to a scientist once about his research. He had created a knockout mouse; he was studying one aspect of the gene but then went to a conference and spoke with another researcher who was studying the same gene in humans. Turns out, a defective version of the gene is responsible for a particular form of blindness in humans. So the researcher asked me, 'well , we examined our mouse and found - what do you suppose? ' He must have thought me terribly stupid, because I just stared at him. So he answered his own question, 'They were blind!'. Well, yeah, duh... The question in my mind was (I didn't ask him since it would have seemed rude; not that that usually stops me), 'you spent all this time and money to create a strain of knockout mouse and you never even noticed they were blind? My tax dollars at work!!!' I thought then, don't they have standard protocols for testing the phenotypes of all new mouse strains? Someone should write some up. As it turns out, there IS a phenotype assessment protocol, the SHIRPA protocol, already well-established before this guy had even started his research. If the guy hadn't had that conversation with that other researcher, how long would it have taken him to figure this thing out, I wonder?
The most sensitive, delicate, important piece of lab equipment is the experimental animal. Yet the way researchers/lab workers treat them... ugh. I'm not even talking about ethical handling and such (that's a whole 'nother can of worms), just the science part. The stuff made out of metal, plastic, and circuits is maintained, calibrated, endlessly fussed over, - but not the critters.