Oh , interesting . Maybe I added a space accidentally , thanks for correcting . <| sep |> It depends . Sometimes we would need live mouse neurons , so live beheadings were common we used just born mice . I didn ' t like the project , I don ' t like killing baby mice that haven ' t even opened their eyes yet . we used scissors for the baby mice . But adult rats . Adult rats needed the guillotine . Ours was spring loaded and it still sometimes took a couple goes to get the head off . When I was doing EM work there was a guy who needed to make some samples EM work takes a ton of prep from mouse kidney or something , so he knocked it out and pretty much skinned it alive everything was still functioning , it ' s skin was just spread out on a tac board like something from a horror film . Yeah , I have a hard time working with animal models . It ' s weird because I have killed a lot of animals in my life , but something about using scissors to cut the heads off of baby mice and then watching someone skin a mouse alive made me realize I ' m glad I focused on microbial models . Microbes don ' t scream .