Book Review: They All Had Eyes

A former vivisectionist regrets his choices

The first book I read about animal research had a pro-vivisection bent. I decided to balance that out by reading the most anti-vivisection book possible. I think They All Had Eyes checks the box. It’s a book from Vegan Publishers, with a back cover blurb by the president of PETA, and an acknowledgements page that begins like this:

This book is dedicated to the many animals whom I tortured and killed in the name of science. If there is a hell, I will spend it forever looking into their eyes.

That’s intense. The book itself is surprisingly lighthearted, though. The author, Michael Slusher, peppers in enough jokes and self deprecating humor so that it isn’t 200 pages of depressing grimness. He’s no Matthew Scully when it comes to writing style, but it’s written well enough to be engaging.

And let’s be real, no one picks this book up for the prose anyway. We want to know what it’s like to do the worst parts of animal research, and what makes someone who does that for decades all of a sudden have a change of heart. To that end, it delivers.

A career of death

Michael Slusher was a nerdy young 22 year old in 1985, struggling to find work after battling substance abuse issues. He found work at a research company called Applied Lipids, working with the lab rats and doing data entry.

Applied Lipids was like the Portlandia “put a bird on it” sketch but for using lipids in drug delivery. Some higher up would say, “Hey, you know how ibuprofen is good for pain relief but causes ulcers? What if we…put a lipid on it?!”

Then Slusher and the rest of the lab would have to give a bunch of rats¹ painkillers to make them get ulcers so they could see if a liposomal delivery method helped.

Slusher provides exquisitely detailed and truly disgusting descriptions of what it was like to cut out ulcerated rat intestines so that he could count and measure the lesions. Many of the animals didn’t even need to be killed at the end of the experiment. Instead, they died from “massive internal bleeding into their gut from their perforated intestines.” This research never went anywhere and was ultimately scrapped.

Slusher, a lifelong animal lover, quickly got comfortable with handling, injecting, weighing, killing, and dissecting the rats. Later, he would become a pro at corralling angry monkeys, drugging them, and preparing them for surgery, and dissecting them. The book reads more like a training manual than a memoir at points. It includes page after page discussing how he went about sedating a monkey, shaving its legs, finding the vein, inserting a catheter, injecting pentobarbital to kill it, cutting out its tongue, cracking its femur, removing its eyeballs, on and on. I guess the point is to show how routine it can become to do quite gross and painful things to an animal against their will.

When you just need a job and some money, the ghastly can become commonplace. At first he wanted to bring all the lab rodents home with him at the end of the day because he felt bad for them, but within days he was unemotionally using the “death bucket” to dispose of rats at the end of an experiment. That particular killing process involved suffocating the animals in a bucket full of carbon dioxide-producing dry ice.

The animal was unconscious in less than a minute, although her gasping for air continued on for several minutes longer. They urinated and defecated first as a fear response and again as they died, when their sphincters relaxed. […] As I removed each rat from the scale, I tossed her into the bucket to join the gasping or already dead bodies of her cage mates.

It’s easy to read this as just one person’s experience at one small company. So I appreciated that Slusher included frequent reminders that everything he was doing was standard practice and affecting millions of animals around the world.

The waste, the suffering, and the lack of results is a constant theme as Slusher moves from Applied Lipids to different animal research jobs, including one at a large public university. It does not make for a heartening read. Here are some anecdotes that stood out to me.

• One day Slusher entered the rat room to find that all their cages had been accidentally flooded. They had spent the night huddled on whatever high ground the could find in their waterlogged spaces, cold, shivering, and barely alive. Though it wasn’t the most gruesome thing discussed, it made me sad to think about those poor things, on top of all that was done to them, not even having a dry cage.

• Some of the veteran monkeys got really crafty with their escape attempts. They learned to fake like they had passed out from the initial dose of sedative, only to spring up later and try to escape. Anyone who thinks that monkeys like being in research facilities because they have an “easy life” with free food should read about these desperate escape maneuvers. They’ll also put in a heroic to avoid getting poked by the syringe in the first place.

• Slusher and his team once literally force fed monkeys a slurry of dirt. His school had been contracted by a local town to test whether the dirt on a particular playground, which contained arsenic, was dangerous. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to throw my hands up and say we should ban animal research altogether.

• After running experiments on beagles, Slusher tried to get the participants adopted out to loving families. He gave up because his supervisor said the general public was not supposed to know they were doing research on dogs. They were killed instead.

The type of research beagle that Slusher was forced to kill via lethal injection (we animals)

What knowledge is worth the cost?

The NSAID that Slusher was studying, using rats and dogs, fell out of favor. It’s now barely used. Thus, Slusher considers those experiments to have been completely pointless. In fact, he says that his whole career was a waste.

None of the studies where I spent so much time and money destroying animal lives had ever resulted in any cures or treatments for disease or other afflictions. Those lives all went to waste.

I can’t argue with his lived experience, I just wish he’d been a little more rigorous when making his dismissals. All animal research is painted as evil, and all information that could give any credence to the vivisectionist side is left out or glossed over. He’ll say stuff like, “My group’s studies were not yielding as much success as originally hoped for and the company was losing financial backers.” Does that mean they had no success? A little success? If it was a little, and how impactful was it? If their lab didn’t succeed, did they share the research with a different lab that made better progress? The reader is left to guess.

Particularly frustrating to me is how Slusher says that research into HIV using monkeys was wasted. I recently wrote about how, yes, there was a lot of suffering inflicted on monkeys. A horrible amount of suffering. But in the end there was a breakthrough that helped make HIV a manageable disease for humans. That seems worth mentioning.

He states that 92% of trials used in animal biomedical research fail, which is unacceptably high. I totally agree with that. Most animal research represents a colossal moral failing. I just think there’s room to acknowledge the horror without totally dismissing the benefits. Being too one sided can drive away those on the fence about all this.

How did he change?

Like when he tried to help the beagles, Slusher has flashes of empathy throughout his journey. A poignant one was when he wrote of how he liked to sit and listen to the rats playing in the dark before he started work.

Sometimes I would enter the room while it was dark and leave the lights off. I would just sit on a stool for a few minutes and listen to them quickly resume their rambunctious play. It was absolutely exhilarating. I marveled at the multitude of rustling, squeaking, and running-about sunds made by the hundreds of animals. The sound would truly fill my ears and it honestly made me smile to think about how much fun was going on at that moment.

The book is full of moments like this, where you are rooting so hard for him to throw down his key card and walk away. But he just keeps on going until he moves across the country for his wife’s job. Inertia is a son of a bitch.

After the move he found himself in a location with no animal research jobs available. Stepping out of that day to day seems to have allowed him some breathing room to reassess his life choices. He started raising a few animals of his own (alapcas, sheep, and chickens) and all of a sudden started feeling guilty about eating meat, given he loved his own animals so dearly. This is fascinating, because he always had pets. I guess baby alpacas break the cuteness scale?

One day, after staring deep into the eyes of his livestock, he decided to go vegetarian. He gave up one type of meat after another before it dawned on him that he could just give it all up in one fell swoop. After “a couple hours of research online” he realized that he could meet his dietary needs being vegan, and that was that. Before he knew it he was super public about his veganism and did his version of the Moby, getting “vegan” tattooed on his wrist.

Musical artist Moby, minutes after seeing a herd of baby alpacas

As expected, there is no step by step guide that others can follow. There was just a lot of little things that added up — his job change, his move, his one vegetarian friend from a few years back who made a comment that stuck with him, his new cute animals, the particular websites he read, and, likely, his all or nothing personality. One day, a switch flipped and that was that. I can empathize with a lot of his journey, as someone who became vegan after having an epiphany when I got my first dog.

The vegan awakening part of the book is much less interesting than the rest of it, which is probably why it’s just a quick chapter at the end. It is a nice chaser after all the horror though.

It’s not the best written book, or the most balanced, or even very helpful in terms of actionable steps for changing hearts and minds. I’m still glad I read it. Slusher’s newfound empathy and kindness shines throughout, and I suspect his stories of working with lab animals will stick with me for a long time. Plus, it’s a great testament to the fact that people doing cruel things are capable of dramatic and positive changes, something that’s always worth remembering.

1. The rats were “hypox” rats, a term I’d never heard before. This means they have had their pituitary gland removed at 25 days of age to make them exceptionally small. These tiny, brain damaged rats were going to unlock the secrets of using liposomes to transport therapeutic drugs. It seems absurd on its surface, but I guess that is standard practice.