All in a Day's Work: Confinement, Torment, Killing in University's Labs

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":

• Cutting the spinal cords and tender eyes of rabbits and tying off the nerves in the paws of rats to study pain
• Buying homeless cats from animal shelters, drilling holes into their heads, and injecting their kittens' brains with harmful chemicals
• Cutting into the chests of dogs from animal shelters and implanting medical devices for deadly heart experiments
• Drilling holes into monkeys' skulls, confining them in tiny cages, and keeping them constantly thirsty so that they will "cooperate" in experiments in exchange for a few drops of water
• Inflicting mice with tumors the size of golf balls that covered the animals' bodies

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.

Written by Logan Scherer