Are happy lab animals better for science?

[C C]

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/a...er-science

EXCERPT: . . . For decades, lab animals such as rodents and fish have lived in barren enclosures: a small plastic box, few—if any—companions, and little else. The smaller the number of variables, the thinking went, the greater the accuracy of the experiment. But a growing number of studies suggests that this approach may have backfired. Only one in nine drugs that works in animals ever succeeds in human clinical trials, and labs often struggle to reproduce one another's results. Could the environment these creatures live in be part of the problem?

That's what a new group of advocates argues. "We're trying to control these animals so much, they're no longer useful," says Joseph Garner, a behavioral scientist who runs a program to improve the value and welfare of lab animals at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "If we want animals to tell us about stuff that's going to happen in people, we need to treat them more like people...."

MORE: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/a...er-science

[Zinjanthropos]

You cannot mess with evolution because whatever you do is also part of it. Not saying that lab rats for instance, have evolved to the point of producing unsuccessful trial subjects so that the species is eventually rendered useless by human experimenters, perhaps ensuring lab rats a better chance of survival. Are our chances of survival improved because lab rats fail these tests thus forcing a relook?

Yet environment is probably the trigger to the evolution gun, so yes environment plays a role here. I can't reduce life to anything more simpler and I've stated this before, I blame everything, even if remotely related to a life form, on evolution. Then again this may be a case where experimenters do not believe their own results, but even then still part of the evolutionary process.