Lab rats: Should they be allowed to vote?

Lee Barats: No, feed them to a snake.

Another terrible idea, Sean. Just awful. Even if rats were humans or even able to communicate with humans, there’s no way they should be voting. And you’re not even talking about normal rats, you’re talking about lab rats that’ve been kept in cages their entire lives and know nothing of the outside world. Lab rat suffrage would be the worst thing since un-sliced bread.

First off, let’s take a look at your typical lab rat. They’ve spent their entire lives getting injected with mind-altering chemicals and wandering through mazes. If that doesn’t cause a creature to go insane, I don’t know what does. Last time I checked, the mentally ill aren’t allowed to vote in this country.

Even if they were granted the right to vote, lab rats would be physically unable to do so. I’ll shake the hand of any rat that cannot only lift a pen, but control it well enough to fill in a circle. Hell, I’ll bet they can’t even read. Do you really want the nation’s illiterate voting? That’s how Larry Simpkins became District 13 controller, and we all know how that turned out.

I bet you haven’t even thought about the political ramifications of granting another species the right to vote. I’ll bet rats will ignore the key issues entirely and vote for the candidates that look most like rats. Nobody wants the 2008 election to come down to Kucinich vs. Paul. If you let rats vote, then why not pigs? Or monkeys? Most politicians look like one of these two, anyway.

OK, let’s pretend lab rats should be able to vote. Congress passes a bill that grants lab rats the right to elect the leader of the free world. Meanwhile, lab rats are being killed off by the thousands as mankind tries to find a cure for cancer. How is a lab rat supposed to make it to 18 years old? Trick question. They don’t. A typical bill costs roughly $3.1 billion to pass. That’s $3.1 billion of tax that could have been used for Darfur, the national debt or kickbacks. And now, any lab rat can vote as long as it reaches 100x its life expectancy.

So remember, Mustang Daily reader, say no to the lab-rat agenda and vote no on Proposition 98.

Sean Michetti: Yes, let Those mutants vote.

Ladies and gentlemen, open your hearts and minds for a moment and imagine Utopia. It undoubtedly includes temperate 80-degree weather, a fountain of youth on every street corner, a clothing-optional lifestyle and equal representation for Rattus norvegicus, the common laboratory rat. In fact, scrap the first three Utopian ideals. Just give justice to the unappreciated lab heroes, where generation after generation is manipulated because of their high degree of homology with humans.

I declare that from this point on, they shall no longer be referred to as rats (largely due to the bad press received for the bubonic plague ordeal); they will rightly be hailed as lab heroes.

Who are other “heroes” in this country? Firemen are heroes. Military personnel can be heroes. Even garbagemen are weekly heroes. Can you imagine the chaos this nation would devolve into should we remove the voting rights of these “heroes”? It would make the 1992 L.A. riots seem like a middle school dance. A U.S. soldier fights for his country, and when he loses a leg, he’s awarded a medal and is a hero. Yet lab heroes will have their B-cells and T-cells crippled, leaving them with a completely defective immune system so that we can test the safety of new vaccines. And what honor do they receive? Just an invitation to be the main course in Purina Dog Chow. They not only deserve a federally-observed holiday in their honor . they deserve a vote.

On “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” the segment “JayWalking” shows everyday Americans attempting to answer easy current political questions. It’s hilarious because they can’t. It’s not hilarious because you may be standing in the polling booth right next to them while they struggle to vote for the most handsome candidate. A lab hero, however, can have its NMDA receptor enhanced for improved memory and learning and become the next Algernon. In fact, if in 2000 our polling stations were run by NMDA-enhanced mice, hanging chads would never have been an issue.

Diabetes, cancer and obesity: it’s just another day in the office for these lab heroes. But they need a political voice, for theirs has been surgically removed and replaced with a Wi-Fi transmitter with poor signal. Because as Boston politician Jonathan Mayhew said in a sermon in 1750, “a mutant strain of mice hell-bent on saving the human race without representation is tyranny.”

Lee Barats is a mechanical engineering senior and Sean Michetti is a journalism senior. Barats and Michetti are the Mustang Daily’s humor columnists and can be contacted at TitsforTats@gmail.com.