I've read many research papers, and the emotionless way they describe doing things like breaking legs, breaking backs and inducing various medical conditions, always bothers me.
I can't see any good alternatives, and I know this is important to advance human medicine, but I can't help but feel it.
Oh, and we never killed mice - we "sacrificed" them (in the lab we said "sacked" for short).
Yeah, it never sat particularly well with me. We and other labs studied neurodegenerative diseases, so we studied a model form of those diseases by inducing it in rats. The Parkinson's lab adjacent to us gave their rats a drug that destroyed their dopaminergic neurons, we inhibited thiamine to cause severe memory impairment. Really horrible things, but I'm not sure that there's a good alternative if we want to study diseases so we can prevent or cure them in humans.
I can't see any good alternatives, and I know this is important to advance human medicine, but I can't help but feel it.