Photo by Devi Puspita Amartha Yahya

In the wild, a mouse or rat leads a precarious life. In the city, they dodge traps, poisons, and broom-wielding humans. In the countryside, they face owls, shotguns, and more poison. As Australia’s deputy prime minister once declared during a nationwide mouse plague, “The only good mouse is a dead mouse.” Yet even that grim existence might be preferable to the fate of those born in cages—bred by the millions each year for use in laboratories across the United States.

More than 111 million mice and rats are used, abused, and killed annually in biomedical research in the U.S. alone. These highly intelligent rodentsaccount for 99 percent of all laboratory animals, but they have no legal protection under the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), which excludes them entirely from its definitions of covered species. Much of this research is funded by taxpayers—over $16 billion a year—even though a majority of Americans oppose the use of animals in scientific research, according to surveys.

Sue Leary, president of the Alternatives Research and Development Foundation, calls the numbers alarming. “If the numbers are anywhere near correct, the amount of pain and suffering that’s occurring in these animals is completely unacceptable,” she said.

When the Model Doesn’t Match the Patient

Beyond the moral cost lies a scientific problem. Mice and rats are convenient and inexpensive to breed, but they are poor stand-ins for human biology. In a landmark 2004 study, biologists Javier Mestas and Christopher C.W. Hughes found that mice and humans have fundamentally different immune responses, making the animals unreliable predictors of human disease or drug effects, pointing out that, as “65 million years of evolution might suggest, there are significant differences” between mouse and human immune responses. “In many cases, not only [do] successful mouse therapies fail to work in the clinic, they actually have opposite effects in patients, leading to exacerbation of disease,” they wrote in a 2007 article in the Mouse in Biomedical Research.

These failures are not isolated. Decades of research have shown that many promising treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and autoimmune diseases crumble when moved from mouse to human trials. The result is a vast expenditure of time, money, and........

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