"Dr. Feeney is studying contusions in rats. What you'll be doing is surgery on the rats to bruise the brain. This surgery will be done without any painkiller, which even I don't like and I'm hardcore into neuroscience. You'll also be killing the rats so we can cut up their brains and look at them. It is really bloody. You'll cut along the stomach and through the ribcage and make several injections into the heart to kill the rat. After that, the rat will be decapitated and its brain will be removed, frozen, and cut into slices. It's really bloody. Does anybody in here have a problem with this sort of animal research?"
Nobody raised their hand, but I knew I had chosen the WRONG lab to sign up for. I'm sure that studying ways to recover function after brain injury is important, but if it involves drilling holes in rats, using a weight to damage their brain, injecting them with amphetamine, then later killing them, I don't want to be a part of it. So, I dropped the lab and signed up for Human Evolution instead. If I want to take a lab, I'll sign up for something less bloody like Human Learning + Memory or Social Psychology Lab.
I still feel ill after touring the laboratory facilities and hearing all the graphic descriptions... The "Feeny Contusion Apparatus" and whatever other bizarre equipment and procedures.... I guess I'd better not do Behavioral Neuroscience in grad school.