Can't sheep get a break?

First, we told you that PETA and Madison, Wisconsin's Alliance for Animals petitioned for prosecution after experimenters at the University of Wisconsin–Madison killed sheep in excruciating U.S. Navy–funded decompression experiments. (Killing animals by decompression is specifically prohibited by Wisconsin's Crimes Against Animals law.)

Now we've learned that 16 sheep were restrained, injected with methamphetamines, shocked with a Taser device for up to 40 seconds and killed in cruel and ineffective experiments aimed at studying how being shocked with a Taser affects the hearts of meth addicts who run from the cops. These ridiculous Taser-funded experiments were conducted at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis by Taser medical director Jeffrey Ho and others. Of course, sheep don't do drugs or resist arrest, and they shouldn't be made to suffer because some humans do. To boot, medical experts, the authors of this sheep study, and others have concluded that data obtained from using Tasers on drugged-up animals (including pigs on cocaine!) are not relevant to humans.

These twisted folks may have violated federal animal protection laws, so PETA has fired off a complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture calling for an immediate investigation. We'll keep you posted as the case unfolds.

In the meantime, here's how you can take action against cruel animal experiments.

Written by Paula Moore

Robert Dziekanski was killed by a Taser stun gun in a Canadian airport last month. Dziekanski’s death, which has been widely reported after a video of the incident was posted on YouTube last night, is one in a long list of fatalities that have been caused by Taser stun guns. And yet Taser International continues to claim that these weapons are safe, practical tools for law-enforcement. How are they able to do this and get away with it?

The strategy’s pretty simple, actually. For years, Taser International has been funding and performing crude experiments on pigs, horses, and other animals that serve no other purpose than to provide them with “evidence” that their weapons are safe for humans. And yet as Robert Dziekanski’s death shows, the information that Taser International has been able to gather from shocking pigs is utterly useless—except insofar as it serves to protect Taser CEO Rick Smith from mounting public opposition to the use of his dangerous weapons.

The Taser situation is a perfect example of a problem that is endemic to all such animal experimentation. As is the case with so many drugs that go to market after animal testing only to be pulled from the shelves when they’re shown to be dangerous to humans, the results of these experiments have no relevance whatever to how humans will be affected, because (as should be obvious to a first-grader) pigs and horses have fundamentally different physiologies to humans. We just don’t work the same way. And the inevitable result—as we’ve seen time and again—is that companies like Taser International manipulate the data from their meaningless experiments to justify whatever argument they care to make. And people like Robert Dziekanski pay the price.

This video shows one of the hideously cruel experiments that Taser International has been performing on bulls, pigs, and other animals since they first tried to rush their weapon to market. Do we really want to stake our safety on the word of a man who does this?