Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
As part of a four-part series on chimpanzees in laboratories published this week, Wired.com tells the story of a chimpanzee named Katrina who was taken from her mother as an infant to be infected with HIV and hepatitis B and C, even though chimpanzees' bodies don't react to these diseases in the same way as humans' do. Katrina was anesthetized almost 300 times by the age of 15 and was never given any painkillers after numerous invasive liver biopsies. This caged, lonely life, punctuated by fear and pain, so traumatized Katrina that she developed symptoms of severe post-traumatic stress disorder and has lost a third of her body weight.
Tragically, despite the fact that Katrina was supposedly retired in 2002, she is one of 14 chimpanzees who were sent to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research eight years later for use in more invasive and painful infectious disease experiments. (Pressure from PETA and other groups successfully halted the transfer of 200 other chimpanzees.) Katrina's plight graphically illustrates how high the stakes are in the fight to ban experiments on great apes.
The Wired series and another story that ran this week in The New York Times come just weeks before the Institute of Medicine's scheduled December release of its report on the issue.
Last month, the editors at Scientific American came out in favor of banning experiments on chimpanzees. To continue to build momentum for the ban, please also post positive comments in response to the Wired and Times articles. Click here to ask your members of Congress to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would ban invasive experiments on all great apes and retire all federally owned chimpanzees currently in laboratories to sanctuaries.
Written by PETA
Update: After meeting with PETA and reviewing our evidence, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected Triple F Farms and confirmed our findings of multiple Animal Welfare Act violations. The USDA's inspection report details, among other atrocities, that newborn ferrets fell through gaping wire cage bottoms and that ferrets were denied adequate food, water, and veterinary care and subjected to major surgeries performed by improperly trained lay employees in unsanitary conditions. Triple F is now under federal investigation. Read the full report to learn about the rest of the USDA's findings.
Original Blog posted September 2nd, 2011:
Personnel with the USDA have inspected Triple F Farms, Inc., a massive ferret-breeding factory farm near Sayre, Pennsylvania, based on evidence that PETA recently presented to the agency following a nearly four-month-long undercover investigation that blew the lid off sickening abuse and neglect of thousands of ferrets there. Bradford County District Attorney Dan Barrett’s office reviewed a complaint filed by PETA and has now begun an investigation of Triple F.
PETA found that Triple F's owners, supervisors, and workers left ferrets with bleeding rectal prolapses, gaping wounds, herniated organs, painful mammary gland infections, and ruptured, bleeding eyes to suffer and die without veterinary care. Triple F forbade workers, including PETA's investigator, to rescue thousands of newborn and young ferrets—who had fallen through wire cage bottoms 3 feet to the concrete floor below—from accumulated piles and puddles of waste, where the animals were left to perish.
Day after day, at least 6,000 ferrets were confined to filthy, severely crowded cages in stifling-hot barns, with hundreds denied food and water. PETA's investigator witnessed workers who stepped on ferrets, buried them in feces, and threw them into an incinerator alive. Triple F employees cut organs and anal sacs out of inadequately anesthetized ferrets, who cried out in pain.
The animals who make it out of this hellhole alive face even more misery because Triple F sells ferrets to laboratories around the world for experimentation as well as to pet shops, including Petland. Triple F has had recent contracts worth nearly $2 million with federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Navy.
PETA is calling for appropriate criminal charges. We've also filed complaints with five other federal and state agencies, including one regarding Triple F's routine exposure of live ferrets to ferret carcasses.
Please help these ferrets by asking CDC director Thomas Frieden to investigate Triple F and determine whether the agency wishes to continue to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars into abusive animal mills like Triple F. Check back for more updates as this case unfolds.
Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post
Update: On October 11, the Puerto Rico Senate approved Senate Resolution 1514 to "[e]xpress the most forceful objection" to Bioculture’s plans, and will now officially "request that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) deny any and all permit requests by Bioculture Mauritus, any of its subsidiaries or Bioculture Puerto Rico, Inc. with the purpose of importing macaca fascicularis [macaque monkeys] into Puerto Rico."
Bioculture—a company that sells nonhuman primates to laboratories—has been dealt a massive blow after the municipality of Guayama, Puerto Rico, and its mayor, Glorimari Jaime Rodríguez, unanimously approved two landmark ordinances banning the import, export, breeding, and use of monkeys in experiments. Bioculture must now terminate its plans to capture more than 4,000 wild monkeys, confine them to cages, breed them in Guayama, and sell their offspring to laboratories for use in painful and deadly tests. Bioculture's client list included hideous labs such as Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories, Charles River Laboratories, Pfizer, and Covance, among others.
PETA, other organizations, world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, leading Indian politician Maneka Gandhi, and Puerto Rico–born actor Benicio del Toro have campaigned hard to get Bioculture's cruel plan stopped. We protested the company and joined Guayama residents in filing a lawsuit, which prompted a Superior Court judge in Puerto Rico to temporarily halt construction of the facility because of Bioculture's flagrant violation of local laws.
In case Bioculture has ideas about setting up shop elsewhere in Puerto Rico, we have also worked with Sen. Melinda Romero Donnelly, who sponsored Senate Resolution 1514 to formally urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to grant any licenses or permits to Bioculture for the importation and breeding of animals in Puerto Rico.
Written by Jennifer O'Connor
We know that chimpanzees have keen intelligence and advanced cognitive skills, so it's no surprise that scientists observing wild chimpanzees in Guinea watched them deliberately set off snare traps designed to catch and kill them (and any other passing animal)—while avoiding harming themselves. The researchers believe that this lifesaving skill has been passed down from one generation to the next.
Just like us, non-human animals of all species want to live in freedom, avoid pain, and seek out comfort. Like us, more than anything, they want to live.
But life skills and ingenuity can't save animals who are deliberately bred for laboratory experiments. Please help us stop a plan to breed monkeys for vivisection in Puerto Rico.
You think "coon on a log" is bad? Allow me to introduce you to the delightful sport of "fox penning," in which dogs are set loose on a fox or coyote confined to a pen and allowed to tear the animal to shreds.
The good news is that this despicable pastime is now banned in Florida, thanks to the efforts of PETA members and other concerned citizens, including several youngsters who were among 80 people who testified on the issue at a Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting.
"I am an athlete, a swimmer, and a basketball player," stated one 10-year-old girl. "If fox penning is a sport, I would be ashamed to call myself an athlete."
Meeting attendee Susan Hargreaves reports that the "[c]ommissioners were captivated by the children's eloquence and courage as they advocated on behalf of the foxes and coyotes who are chased by packs of dogs with no hope of escape and a certain, bloody death."
The commissioners voted to permanently prohibit fox penning earlier this week.
I hope this inspires everyone to speak up for animals. If a 10-year-old can do it, so can those of us who are all growed up! You can get started by contacting the wildlife departments in states where fox penning is still legal.
Written by Alisa Mullins
In July 2008, PETA received an anonymous letter reporting that "many monkeys" had died at Charles River Laboratory's (CRL) Sparks, Nevada, facility because of a heating system malfunction. We immediately filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which opened an investigation. After the incident, CRL was fined $10,000 for the death of 32 monkeys—and then went right back to selling and experimenting on millions of animals.
Jumping forward to earlier this year, another horror story broke from behind the walls of a CRL lab in Reno, Nevada. Employees at this facility carelessly ran a monkey through a high-temperature cage washer and boiled him alive. CRL was once again fined, this time for $4,000.
Now news outlets across the country are reporting on the combined $14,000 in fines for the deaths of these 33 monkeys—who were forced to endure the excruciating pain of being cooked alive because of employee ineptitude—and people everywhere are crying out for tighter regulations.
Compared to the usual slap on the wrist that abusive companies receive, these fines are hefty. But for a billion-dollar corporation with a long and sordid history of violating federal animal protection laws—and the iniquitous distinction of being the world's largest tester and supplier of animals for use in experimentation—they're like parking tickets. CRL is responsible for the imprisoning, poisoning, mutilating, and killing of literally tens of millions of animals—from mice to dogs to monkeys—in its own laboratories and those of its customers.
While the deaths of these monkeys have shined some light on the horrors that occur inside CRL, it is the everyday operations of this company and others like it that cause animals the most suffering and death.
Lets's hope that CRL's recent closing of a testing facility in Massachusetts is a sign of things to come for the entire nasty company.
Written by Logan Scherer
Here's a promising development in the midst of the recession: Charles River Laboratories—one of the world's largest suppliers of animals for experimentation—has announced that it is closing up shop in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. We're hoping these cutbacks mean that the cruel, callous industry giant will continue to suffer.
With its long history of abusing animals, Charles River Laboratories should really be called Hell's Kitchen—its facilities have literally cooked live animals to death. News broke last week of a monkey at a Charles River lab in Reno who was "literally boiled alive" last year after he was left in a cage that was put through one of the facility's high-temperature cage washers (think industrial-sized dishwasher)—despite the fact that lab workers claim that the cage was checked three times (?!). This followed an incident in 2008 when 32 monkeys under Charles River's "care" were baked alive after a thermostat malfunction—even though the procedure in place to alert staff apparently had been followed. No one even discovered the deaths until the following morning. PETA filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture about that negligent oversight, and Charles River was eventually fined $10,000.
Charles River officials attributed all these horrific and easily preventable deaths to "human error." We agree. But the human error responsible is the conscious decision that experimenters and their suppliers make every day to go to work and torment animals. Judging from its desperate downsizing, we foresee a future in which the folks of Charles River will need to find a different path of employment.
In the wake of the recent release of our undercover investigation exposing cruelty and suffering inside animal labs at the University of Utah, students, local PETA supporters, and members of Salt Lake Animal Advocacy Movement gathered outside the university's Park Building yesterday and urged the swarm of spectators to help put an end to the cruelty committed against the dogs, cats, and other animals confined to the University's labs.
The demonstrators weren't just humans—some adorable companion animals campaigned for the cause too. Together, they collected signatures for a petition to scrap the law that requires government-run shelters to make homeless animals—even those who are friendly, trained, and adoptable—available to universities and private labs for experimentation and testing. How could you not put your name to something these guys are supporting:
Join the effort and urge the University of Utah to stop abusing shelter animals in its labs immediately.
For more than eight months this year, a PETA investigator worked undercover inside University of Utah animal labs, where she documented the miserable conditions and daily suffering of dogs, cats, monkeys, rats, mice, rabbits, frogs, cows, pigs, and sheep. Today, The Salt Lake Tribune ran a story about the investigation, including the response from Tom Parks, the university's vice president for research. The response is (not so) stunningly callous: "None of the things she alleges are substantive. It's a remarkably banal list of ordinary events in an animal-care facility."
Here's a list of the things the university considers "banal"—part of an "ordinary" day in the "animal-care facility":
Brain injections, desperate thirst, tumors, and holes in skulls: just another banal day in the lab, right?
We have filed complaints against the university with the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and local law-enforcement officials, and you can take action to help animals at the University of Utah too.
Yesterday morning, Procter & Gamble's annual meeting received a special guest when a PETA doggie (a gal in a costume, not a canine in Norfolk) stopped by to urge P&G—the maker of Iams dog food—to stop making animals suffer in laboratories.
PETA's ongoing campaign to end animal testing at Iams has led the manufacturer to end all invasive and deadly animal tests involving dogs and cats—but Iams refuses to end its support for experiments on other species, and it still keeps as many as 700 dogs locked up in its laboratories for feeding trials and nutritional studies.
To encourage passersby to choose cruelty-free doggie chow, PETA demonstrators passed out free samples of V-dog high-protein dog food. Not only is V-dog not tested on animals, it's also vegan!
V-dog is one of many alternatives to animal-unfriendly dog food. You can check out a complete list of cruelty-free dog foods here.
Written by Amanda Schinke
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If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.