UPDATE: On June 8, 2011, the IOM announced that another biased member of the committee whom PETA had objected to, John Stobo, would also no longer be serving on the committee.    
 

Last year, under pressure from PETA and others, the National Institutes of Health halted plans to send nearly 200 retired chimpanzees back to a laboratory. Smarting from the public outcry, NIH asked the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM) to conduct a study to determine whether the U.S. should continue to be the only nation in the industrialized world to allow invasive experiments on chimpanzees.

The answer seems obvious, especially given the public's overwhelming disapproval of treating our closest living relatives like laboratory equipment. But instead of giving chimpanzees a fair shake, the IOM stacked its recently announced 15-member review committee with animal experimenters and people from institutions that have openly lobbied against federal legislation to end chimpanzee experimentation. Not only did the IOM not disclose these blatant conflicts of interest, as is required by law, it also stated that anyone representing an animal advocacy group was automatically disqualified from serving on the committee!
 

 
PETA immediately wrote to the IOM protesting the biased committee and calling for it to be disbanded. After hearing from us, the IOM has removed two of the members we objected to, including one who works for a pharmaceutical company that experiments on chimpanzees. Now, if only the IOM would balance the scales and replace those two with people who see animals as more than furry test tubes.

You can help keep chimpanzees out of laboratories by letting your senators and representatives know that you support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes once and for all.
 

Written by Michelle Sherrow

Thomas Lersch / CC by 3.0

Update: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has written to National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins urging him to scrap plans to transfer more than 200 "retired" chimpanzees from the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research laboratory in Texas. He has also requested the return of 15 chimpanzees who have already been transferred.

"New Mexico wants to save these chimpanzees, who have already given so much of their lives to the American public as part of medical research studies," says the governor. "There is a compassionate and prudent alternative to the National Center for Research Resources' plan, and I feel strongly that we must save the chimpanzees."

Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico is also working hard to ensure that the chimpanzees are spared from further experiments. Stay tuned for more updates.

The folks at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) must have had their fingers crossed behind their backs when they "retired" 288 chimpanzees—who had previously been used in Air Force gravity experiments—to the Alamogordo Primate Facility (APF) in New Mexico. I say this because NIH has now decided to "unretire" the surviving chimpanzees (more than 21 have died in the decade they've spent warehoused in cages at APF, including three who died by electrocution because of unsafe conditions). The animals will be sent to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR) laboratory in Texas, where they will likely be subjected to cruel experiments.

SFBR might sound familiar to readers of this blog because it is the same laboratory where two baboons escaped from cages in May and attacked two employees. PETA filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which then cited SFBR for failure to handle animals in a manner that does not cause trauma or physical harm as well as failure to provide animals with adequate and safe housing. SFBR had previously been cited twice—in 2009 and in February of this year—for failure to house animals in structurally sound enclosures in order to prevent them from escaping and injuring themselves and others. In one incident, a monkey escaped from a cage, got outside into the freezing cold, suffered from hypothermia, and later was euthanized as a result.

SFBR's "punishment" for these offenses? It gets more than 200 chimpanzees to confine, scare, poke, and prod.

Half of the chimpanzees at APF have been living in cages for at least a quarter of a century. As PETA Vice President Kathy Guillermo wrote today in a letter to NIH, it's time to truly retire these primates to a sanctuary, rather than sending them back to a laboratory where they are sure to endure tremendous physical and psychological trauma, possibly for the rest of their lives—which could last another quarter century or more.

Please take a minute to send your own letter to APF and let it know that "retirement" means living the rest of your life free from stress (and not confined to a cage).

Written by Alisa Mullins

personalbrandingblog / CC

Hold onto your hats, folks. The University of Michigan has been forced to pay back $1.4 million (yes, that's with seven digits) after it "accidentally" used federal grant money for experiments on animals that it continued long after its approval had lapsed.

The massive refund came to light after PETA filed a Freedom of Information Act request and uncovered documents indicating that U-M had violated federal regulations and guidelines on numerous occasions, including allowing animals to die from starvation and dehydration, performing unauthorized surgeries, and "inadvertently" throwing dozens of animals into a trash compactor.

One U-M experimenter injected a rabbit with an unauthorized anesthetic, which meant that the rabbit had to be euthanized after suffering necrosis of ear tissue and trauma to the eye. In another incident, half a dozen animals died when the chamber in which their cages had been placed caught fire. Some of the animals died of smoke inhalation, while others drowned as their cages filled with water from the sprinkler system.

Most importantly costly, as it turned out, U-M was charging the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the care of animals who were no longer enrolled in approved experiments. In a March 2007 internal investigation ordered by NIH, U-M determined that over a period of six months, there were 33 incidents in which experimenters continued to test on animals even though the experiments did not have the required approval from the oversight committee.

Unfortunately, this is what happens when the folks who are supposed to implement universities' so-called "animal care and use programs" just … well … don't, and when big, bloated bureaucracies like NIH—which gave U-M $423.2 million in 2008 alone—throw money at guys in white lab coats without bothering to check and see what they're actually doing with it.

We're now calling on NIH revoke the University of Michigan's "assurance," which allows U-M to receive federal funding to perform experiments on animals. Hey, it never hurts to ask, right?

Written by Alisa Mullins