Fleming - animal research

Well, I’m a strong proponent of research with animals. I’m not a strong proponent of hurting animals. I’m not a strong proponent of making the life of animals difficult. I value animals. In fact, I wouldn’t do research with animals if I didn’t value them because I think the information you get from them is very informative, not only about humans, but about animals themselves.

So I’m really interested in animal behaviour. I’m interested in what you see across many animal species and humans. Mothering is an interesting example because it turns out that the factors; the biological factors that influence or regulate mothering are quite conserved across a lot of species. So, just to give you two examples: if you look at the role of odors, okay, now it turns out that if you look at sheep mothers, they’re called ewes, they respond to their newborns based on their odor and they will accept the odor that is their newborn’s odor, that they get exposed to very very quickly after birth. In about five minutes they really learn about that odor, and they will reject all alien young that don’t have that same smell. Smell is really, really important. In rats, young that have been reared on a mother that has one particular odor will grow up to respond preferentially to young that have that same odor. So there’s a long term effect of odor on initial responses. The odor of young rat pups to a new mother is very very attractive. That same smell to a virgin animal who’s never given birth is either neutral or aversive. So that odor is a way of developing a sort of, you develop an attraction to that cue.

In humans, there’s a huge amount of work now. We’ve shown that new mothers become very very attracted to the body odors and head odors of their babies. They learn to recognize their babies based on those odors, okay. They can make a discrimination within 24 hours based on those odors. So that’s rapid learning. It’s highly salient, the odor is highly salient. So that’s an example of across a number of different species a particular sensory input being important to help mothers make the transition. You do the research in the animals, you ask the questions in humans. You say, okay, we know what is true of five different species, is this true of humans? So it helps you develop your questions. So I would say it’s really important to study animals, as it is to study humans. We’re all part of the same family.