With the Budget Control Act of 2011's 7.8 percent cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on track to kick in at the start of 2013, PETA is urging Congress to take a more drastic measure—cut all funding for wasteful experiments on animals. 

In a letter sent today to congressional leaders, PETA explains that nearly half of NIH's current $30 billion annual research budget is awarded to projects that involve cruel experiments on animals, which do nothing to advance human health and which contribute to the country's expanding deficit. These projects include cruel and costly experiments like these:

• The University of California–San Francisco receives more than $360,000 a year in federal largesse for erectile dysfunction experiments in which rats have their penises cut apart before being killed.
• Columbia University gets half a million dollars a year to addict female monkeys to crack and cocaine in order to see how their drug use is affected by their menstrual cycle.
• The University of Wisconsin–Madison receives more than $330,000 a year for a project in which chicken eggs are injected with pure alcohol to see how the exposure affects baby chicks.
• Oregon Health & Science University—which already bears responsibility for the infamous (and lethal) "gay sheep" experiments—collects more than $2 million a year for a project that includes examining whether the offspring of obese female monkeys are more frightened of Mr. Potato Head dolls than are children of non-obese mothers.

That last one is no joke …

… but it has a sick punch line: Because animal species differ from one another biologically in many significant ways, experiments on animals almost never produce results that can be applied to humans in a meaningful way.

What You Can Do

Please tell your representatives in Washington to stop wasting lives, money, and opportunities on cruel and ineffective experiments on animals.

With the approach of holiday travel, drivers nationwide are anticipating pain at the pump—but it will sting a bit more for some motorists in Madison, Wisconsin, where  gas stations in high-traffic areas are now displaying PETA ads with a shocking photo taken inside a University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) laboratory in which dozens of cats were abused and killed as part of a continuing taxpayer-funded experiment.

Truth Will Out

The ads show a gentle tabby named Double Trouble restrained in a bag with a steel post screwed into her skull. It's just one of the photos that PETA obtained following a three-year legal battle against UW. They were taken by the experimenters as part of an appalling project in which cats also have steel coils implanted in their eyes and electrodes inserted into their brains, are starved for days at a time, and are intentionally deafened.

Following complaints by PETA and a former UW veterinarian, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are investigating apparent violations of federal animal welfare regulations and misuse of federal funding related to these horrible experiments. After UW officials fought for years to keep the photographic evidence of Double Trouble's wretched life and protracted death secret, PETA's ads are showing their friends and neighbors exactly how cats are tormented and killed behind the school's laboratory doors.

What You Can Do

Learn more about UW's shameful secrets, and please urge the federal government to stop funding this primitive and lethal experiment.

Students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) likely had no idea that as they made their way to class, they were passing by a laboratory in which cats, exactly like the ones many of the students would return home to, were being tormented and killed in gruesome experiments. But PETA set out to show the students exactly what was going on behind closed doors on their campus and to enlist their support to get the experiments stopped.

UW experimenters did not want information about their cruel sound localization experiments on cats to be released, and they fought PETA for more than three years to try to keep the information under wraps. But we sued the school for release of the disturbing pictures taken of the laboratory's feline victims—and got the photos.  

PETA members marched onto campus holding signs emblazoned with the graphic images of Double Trouble, one of the many cats UW abused. UW faculty drilled holes into Double Trouble's head, screwed a steel post to her skull, implanted electrodes in her brain, and put coils in her eyes. They dripped toxic chemicals into her ears to deafen her, then implanted devices in both ears. During at least two of these surgeries, Double Trouble's anesthesia was inadequate, and she woke up or was conscious and likely in pain.

Experimenters immobilized Double Trouble's head and made her try to locate sounds coming from different directions. They starved her for days in order to make her cooperate during these experiments in exchange for a piece of food. When the experimenters were done using Double Trouble, they killed and decapitated her.

And after all the pain and trauma that Double Trouble was subjected to, the experimenters admitted that the project was a failure. Meanwhile, institutions around the world study how the brain locates sounds by using advanced methods with human volunteers.

Many UW students signed PETA's petition asking the National Institutes of Health to stop giving the school taxpayer money to fund these cruel experiments. You can, too.

Update: Based on PETA complaints documenting abuse and neglect of animals in the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston's laboratories, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken the rare step of fining the facility $9,143 for egregious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act—including failing to supply veterinary care to a sheep who had been used in experimental back surgery and could not stand up, failing to supply adequate veterinary care to a goat who died on an operating table, and failing to supply post-procedural pain relief to three sheep used in experimental surgeries.

What do you do when a judge rules that your experiments on animals violated state law and you're in jeopardy of losing government funding for the cruel project? Well, if you're the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW), you try to hide the painful and illegal decompression experiments on sheepby disguising them as another project in order to keep the gravy train flowing. In the U.S. Navy–funded experiment, sheep were confined to high-pressure hyperbaric chambers and forced to endure crippling joint pain, seizures, nausea, paralysis, vomiting, burning, deep chest pain and in some cases, death.

PETA has obtained internal documents from UW showing that school lawyers, administration, and faculty met and discussed rewriting the project description "to avoid the legal problems that the previous study caused."  Even though the experiment still risked killing sheep by decompression in violation of the law, members of the UW animal experimentation oversight committee considered reapproving the project and actually directed the experimenter to rewrite the description to eliminate the terms "decompression" and "death." Other documents PETA obtained suggest that UW knew that these experiments were illegal for more than two decades. Thankfully, the project was ultimately not reapproved, and it remains on ice to this day. PETA has turned over all its findings to the special prosecutor who is considering filing charges against UW in this case. 

Burn experiments on pigs at UTMB

 
In another ongoing case, the Texas attorney general has ordered the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) to surrender to PETA numerous documents related to experiments at the school, including studies in which Bunsen burners and hot metal rods are used to inflict third-degree burns on animals (some of whom suffered burns on up to 40 percent of their bodies). UTMB had repeatedly denied PETA the documents, trying to evade public-records laws. PETA has already filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture about the abuses and will use the documents to further expose how animals are forced to suffer in laboratories at UTMB.

You can help by sending an e-mail to UTMB’s president, asking him to investigate the school’s laboratories and dismiss employees who are abusing animals.  

Written by Michelle Sherrow