Friends of the Rat

The Food section’s Newsbites column (Sept. 6) contained a short article about rats who died of respiratory failure after ingesting large quantities of hot sauce. The article was light in tone and admonished readers not to drink quarts of hot sauce or “shoot up” with hot sauce lest they suffer a similar fate. Can you imagine, however, the suffering involved in this reported experiment? Obviously the rats didn’t rush to overindulge a hot-sauce passion--they must have been force-fed. A death by respiratory failure, for man, rat, dog, horse, etc. is a horrible one.