The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has ordered the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC) to pay more than $12,000 in fines for its cruel, incompetent—and sometimes fatal—treatment of animals, citing the institution for 10 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) in its laboratories between 2008 and 2010. Two of the citations in the penalty were the result of a 2008 complaint filed by PETA.

Learning the Hard(-Hearted) Way

After PETA submitted information about archaic and deadly medical training exercises in which rabbits at UCHC had needles repeatedly stabbed into their chests, the USDA found that the facility didn't properly seek non-invasive alternatives nor did it adequately document how the animals were used. The other violations for which UCHC was cited and fined include rabbit deaths caused by improper anesthesia and poorly trained employees.

UCHC was previously fined $5,500 by the USDA in 2007 for AWA violations, including injecting unapproved substances into a monkey's brain and an incident in which a monkey was dragged so roughly by a metal collar that his eyes bled. That penalty resulted from complaints filed by PETA Associate Director Justin Goodman, who was then a UConn grad student leading a successful campaign to end experiments on primates at the school. Not only were the experiments permanently shut down, but following a PETA complaint, the laboratory was also ordered to return $65,000 in federal funding.

And that's not all: In 2001, UConn's main campus paid $129,000 in USDA fines for 99 violations of animal welfare laws. You'd hope the university would have learned its lesson by now, but as long as animals are suffering in school laboratories, PETA will be working to stop the violence.

Rabbits are frequent victims of animal experimenters because they are mild-tempered and easy to handle, confine, and breed—more than 241,000 of them are abused in U.S. laboratories every year.

What You Can Do

Last year, the University of Connecticut's Health Center and main campus received more than $63.5 million from the National Institutes of Health, of which more than 40 percent will be spent on animal experimentation. Please ask the federal government to stop funding cruel and antiquated animal experiments and to put your tax dollars toward modern, humane, and superior research methods.

You don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to know that all mammals need water to survive, yet this basic biology principle is apparently lost on the clever folks at Harvard. For the second time in three months, a monkey has died of dehydration at the Ivy League institution: On Sunday, an elderly cotton-top tamarin was euthanized at Harvard Medical School (HMS) after it was discovered that the monkey's cage had no water bottle, an inexcusable oversight that led the university to suspend new experiments at its New England Primate Research Center (NEPRC).

The monkey's death came on the same day that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) made public an inspection report that revealed three other incidents involving the neglectful endangerment of monkeys at the facility in the past three months, including another monkey's death. This recent series of deaths has prompted PETA to call on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend all funding to HMS and NEPRC and to demand a refund of any grant money spent on activity that violated federal animal protection laws, which is required by federal grant guidelines.

Milo was imprisoned at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC), a facility where PETA conducted a shocking undercover investigation

A History of Violations

The USDA has cited HMS and NEPRC for more than 20 violations of the Animal Welfare Act during the past two years, including the following incidents involving serious injuries and deaths:

• In January of this year, two primates became severely dehydrated and one died. In another incident, a primate suffered two broken bones when his leg was smashed in a heavy cage door. Another primate suffered serious foot injuries after he and others escaped from improperly secured cages.

• In December 2011, a staff member caught an escaped primate with a net, performed an imaging procedure on him, and upon returning the animal to his cage, discovered that he had died.

• In July 2011, a primate had to be euthanized after he was given an overdose of an anesthetic that caused acute kidney failure.

• In June 2010, a primate was found dead in a cage after it was run through a scalding-hot mechanical cage washer.

What PETA is asking for isn't unprecedented. Other universities, including the University of Connecticut and the University of Michigan, have had to return thousands of dollars in grant money after PETA and others uncovered animal welfare violations. After all, it seems only reasonable that our hard-earned tax dollars shouldn't be paying for activity that violates the law.

How You Can Help

While the recent deaths of monkeys at Harvard appear to have resulted from carelessness, HMS and NEPRC confine 2,300 other primates and deliberately commit unspeakable horrors against them, such as drilling holes into their skulls and subjecting them to cocaine addiction experiments. Ask the NIH to stop funding this cruelty at Harvard and elsewhere.

therockhandle / CC

The following is a guest post from peta2's Ryan

As those of you who have been keeping up with your NCAA "March Madness" brackets will know, this year's college basketball championship series is down to the final four schools, all vying for the top spot. Unfortunately, they're all losers.

I say this because, in a tragic irony, the universities that have the most talented athletes also seem to hire some of the cruelest animal abusers in the nation.

Need proof?

Villanova University vs. University of North Carolina

Villanova experimenters inject methamphetamine into rats' stomachs to determine whether the drug influences the rats' response time in behavioral tests (gee, I wonder). Unfortunately, as you might have seen in our "Who Cares?" video, this kind of pointless and cruel test on rats and mice is still legal—in fact, no experiment on them, no matter how painful, is against the law.

Maria Boccia, a vivisector at UNC–Chapel Hill, removes rat pups—at 2 to 14 days old—from their mothers for extended periods of time in order to induce a deep depression in the mother rats. She then places the mothers in cylinders of water from which they can not escape in order to see how quickly they are overcome with a sense of helplessness and stop swimming.

University of Connecticut vs. Michigan State University

At University of Connecticut, experimenters implant steel rods into rabbits' spines to keep them immobile. They then shock the rabbits with electrodes and measure the animals' brainwaves while they are still awake.

Not to be outdone, the returning "champion" from last year's contest, MSU vivisector Arthur Weber has continued his "work" removing the eyes of cats while the animals are still alive. Weber attempted to justify his cruel and pointless experiments last year; on Weber's behalf, an MSU official stated, "The animals are completely anesthetized, receive painkillers, and once the animals come out of the anesthesia, 10 minutes later you can't tell the difference." Yeah, you're probably right. I'm sure eyes are overrated anyway. What?! And don't forget the part where you keep them alive for a week after the operation and then kill them—I'd be willing to bet my March Madness pool money that they notice that too!

Of course, it's not the basketball players' fault that their schools hired such colossal creeps—animal experimentation is big business. As shown above, though, no amount of money can keep animal abusers from being morally bankrupt.

Written by Ryan Huling