MINNEAPOLIS — A Macalester College alum and medical doctor who has spent decades trying to end the use of animals in scientific research says the St. Paul school is lying when it claims to use the highest ethical standards for animal welfare in its labs.

Dr. Neal Barnard, a Maryland resident, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in Hennepin County District Court against Macalester, alleging it has misrepresented its program to the public by using live animals like rats in psychology class labs. He wants Macalester to either stop using animal labs when there’s an alternative method available or take down statements about following animal welfare standards and ethical rules from its website.

“To my shock and amazement, Macalester is stuck in out-of-date education, cruel animal experiments that are, astoundingly enough, more than 100 years old,” Barnard said in an interview. “I came to feel that the school is being fraudulent when it says it adheres to the highest standards — it just doesn’t."

Macalester did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday morning.

His claims are part of a broader movement in animal research; no medical school in the U.S. or Canada uses animals in its curriculum anymore, though the schools may conduct other animal research, Barnard said.

He said he learned about Macalester’s current animal practices over the past two years when he got involved in fundraising and planning for his 50th class reunion this year. He wants the college to give back his $100 donation and is seeking a declaration that Macalester continues to violate Minnesota law by “making misrepresentations to the public” online about its animal use.

“My hope is to get them to clean up their act,” he said.

Macalester’s website states that “animal welfare standards and ethical principles are applied at the highest possible level in any animal use or research conducted at or in association with the college.” It also says that ethical principles and standards for animal care “align with best practices” used at other research institutions, the lawsuit says.

But Macalester officials have confirmed that they’re still conducting animal experiments based on the work of a famous psychologist who invented a device called the “Skinner box” in the 1920s, the lawsuit said. It’s designed to study how animals, such as rats or birds, learn by rewarding or punishing them for pushing a lever in the box. The boxes are used to teach the concept of operant conditioning.

In Skinner box experiments, animals are deprived of food or water beforehand and may receive a reward, like food pellets, or a punishment, like an electrical shock, for pushing the levers.

Because of its use of the device, Barnard, who founded a national nonprofit advocating for ethical and effective scientific research in 1985 called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says that Macalester’s online ethical statements aren’t true.

He has spoken with the psychology department chair, he said, who assured him that Macalester was “very careful” in its work with animals. He later met with Macalester President Suzanne Rivera. Barnard said he was initially hopeful things would change, but Rivera emailed him to say all future communications about animal use should be directed to the college’s legal counsel.

Barnard said he was a psychology major at Macalester in the 1970s when he first used the Skinner box, working with rats and pigeons. He was surprised when his friend told him behind-the-scenes details.

“He said, ‘You don’t know what goes on here,’” Barnard said.

It was that friend’s work study job to deprive the animals of food and water. Later, when the experiments were through, he put all the rats in a trash can and covered them with something poisonous to kill them, possibly chloroform, Barnard said.

“I had to go in and snuff out all these guys,” said Clark Gustafson, who had the work study job. “It really bothered me.”

In the lawsuit, Barnard said that, over many years practicing as a psychiatrist — he’s worked in psychiatry wards, in private practice and is currently an adjunct faculty member at the George Washington University School of Medicine — he’s found that Skinner’s findings had “no relevance in any of these settings and were rarely, if ever, discussed in relation to any aspect of psychiatric treatment.”

Both society’s view of animals and modern teaching methods have changed dramatically since the 1920s, Barnard said, citing both Jane Goodall’s work that said “animals aren’t just blocks of wood” but have inner lives and interests. Psychotherapy and behavioral interventions have been developed, the lawsuit said.

“If you can become a physician without experimenting on animals, surely you can be a good psychology student ... without reducing yourself to cruelty to small animals,” he said.

In the lawsuit, Barnard says using live animals, Skinner boxes and depriving animals of food or water and then killing them runs afoul of current ethical guidelines in research, he said. If there’s a way to teach a lesson without using animals, they shouldn’t be used, he said.

“And it’s pretty clear to me that nobody considered an alternative because, if they had considered it, they would have found it,” he said.

Barnard, who plans to attend his reunion on Friday, is putting up three billboards in the Twin Cities regarding the claims in the lawsuit.

“If [Macalester officials] go to court and say, ‘We have stopped all of this,’ the lawsuit will be mooted out,” Barnard said. “If they do anything else, they’ve got a fight on their hands.”

-------------

©2025 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.