#Blind ended vessel meaning skin#

I keep mulling over a quote by the American writer and muckraker Upton Sinclair, whose book The Jungle (1906) exposed conditions in the meatpacking industry. I sense sheвЂ™s working through options: вЂLeap from the cage IвЂ™ve spent my life trying to escape? Or retreat back inside?вЂ™ With freedom right there, they nearly always jump back to the familiar. The other walks its rim, balancing as if on a high wire. One folds her belly over the rim, like a child pulling herself out of a pool. One of her sisters sits in the corner of the open cage. In the dark behind us, shelves contain hundreds of shoeboxes just like it. Because her cage is difficult to cover while IвЂ™m holding a mouse, it lies open. Moulded from clear plastic, its floor is lined with a thin layer of paper bedding. With forceps, I drop the snippet into a small plastic tube, a microcuvette marked with a Sharpie pen: 896A.Д«eside us, her cage looks like a shoebox. To collect her DNA, I use scissors to cut off a snippet of her tail. ItвЂ™s a kind of branding, a way to identify her, mouse A, the first of four from cage 896. Then, with a hole punch that I could use for office paper, I divot the lower edge of her right ear.

A low ceiling fan blows germfree air down onto the stainless-steel countertop and over three mice in an open cage, and their sister wriggling between my thumb and index finger.ДЄs I pinch back the loose skin over her shoulders, her forearms splay outward. Of the thousands of bodies in this room, only five of us reflect the fluorescent lights.

#Blind ended vessel meaning skin#