A primate at a Covance primate testing lab.

Update: After receiving PETA's request for an investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that Bristol-Myers Squibb was to blame for the hanging death of the monkey and cited the company for violating the Animal Welfare Act.

 As if being locked inside a laboratory and treated like a living test tube weren't torture enough, a whistleblower informed PETA that a monkey and a rat were recently scalded to death at pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb's laboratory in Pennington, New Jersey. Their cages were run through the high-pressure cage washer with the animals still inside, causing the trapped animals intense agony and terror as the blistering-hot water burned their flesh.

Also according to the whistleblower, another monkey strangled to death after she was attached to the front of her cage, apparently by some sort of leash, and then left unattended. All three of these tragic deaths, which reportedly occurred over a six-month period, could have been easily prevented. So what's going on at Bristol-Myers?

A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection report substantiates the whistleblower's report of a monkey dying in the cage washer, and based on this, PETA suspects that the other allegations are also true. But it's Bristol-Myers Squibb's turn to be in hot water now: PETA has submitted complaints to the USDA and the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, asking both to investigate and hit the multibillion-dollar company where it hurts—in its bank account—if these allegations are true.

But what the pharma giant really must do is stop subjecting tens of thousands of dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, and monkeys to imprisonment, pain, and death. PETA, which holds stock in Bristol-Myers Squibb specifically for the purpose of addressing the company's board and stockholders, has submitted a shareholder resolution urging it to reduce the company's reliance on animal tests by switching to modern, non-animal methods and to provide greater transparency of its animal testing practices. Please, click here to ask Bristol-Myers Squibb's CEO to take personal responsibility for making sure that these recommendations are implemented.

Following the finding by the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) that a former professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University hurt animals in experiments and then lied about the results to get more federal funding, PETA has sent a letter to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) urging the agency to take back more than $2.8 million in taxpayer money granted to the disgraced (and disgraceful) vivisector during the period of misconduct.

Mean Methods, False Findings

Specifically, the ORI determined that Michael Miller—formerly a professor and chair of SUNY Upstate's department of neuroscience and physiology—lied about the results of his experiments in which he forced alcohol into pregnant mice, rats, and monkeys. The babies of these animals were then killed and their brains were cut out. Miller submitted the fabricated data in his applications to get even more funding from NIAAA—part of the federal National Institutes of Health—and also sent them to scientific journals. Several journals have already retracted the articles.

Unfortunately, this kind of fraud isn't unheard of. The only animal some experimenters seem to care about is the cash cow—and it appears some of them will do just about anything to keep the grant money flowing. If they're going to lie about the results, they could at least have the decency to leave the animals out and fake the experiments altogether.

How You Can Help Animals in Laboratories

Please tell your representative and senators in Congress to divert public money away from cruel animal experiments like Miller's and into promising, lifesaving, and relevant clinical and non-animal research.

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.

Exciting news! Two more air carriers, TAM and Hainan Airlines, have announced that they will no longer transport primates for use in cruel laboratory experiments! PETA and other animal protection organizations put the pressure on the airlines after it was revealed that they were recently handling shipments of monkeys to laboratories in North America.

Richard Fisher | cc by 2.0

Now we're that much closer to stopping the transport of primates for use in experiments once and for all—but we're not there yet.

How You Can Help Keep Animals out of Laboratories

Please continue to tell the few remaining airlines that ship primates to laboratories—including Air France, China Eastern Airlines, and Continental Airlines—that cruelty should be grounded.

As the U.S. Congress considers the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would permanently ban the use of chimpanzees in invasive experiments and retire all 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, Rampart star Woody Harrelson has written a letter to one of his California senators, Barbara Boxer, on behalf of PETA imploring her in her key role as the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to support the bill:

Less than two weeks after receiving appeals from PETA and PETA Germany, RWTH Aachen University, a top German college, has announced that it will no longer perform invasive and deadly training exercises on live pigs in its advanced surgical course, effective immediately!

Truly 'Advanced' Training

Earlier this month, PETA and PETA Germany sent university officials and the German state veterinary authority a detailed dossier outlining humane and superior surgical training methods that—unlike the cruel procedures then used by RWTH Aachen—wouldn't risk violating German laws requiring the use of non-animal teaching methods when available.

The outreach to RWTH Aachen followed PETA Germany's discovery that as part of the "Advanced Skill Course" at the school's surgical clinic, students were cutting open pigs' chests, inserting tubes, and surgically removing their organs before finally killing the animals.

Move the Momentum to Michigan

While RWTH Aachen and the University of Ulm in Germany have both recently scrapped the crude and archaic use of pigs in labs in favor of training surgeons on modern and sophisticated 21st century technology, some U.S. facilities—including the University of Michigan—continue to cut holes into pigs' limbs, throats, and chests and stab needles into their bones and hearts for trauma training exercises even though superior simulation methods exist.

How You Can Help These Pigs

Please tell officials at the University of Michigan to cut out cruel trauma training on pigs and start using humane, contemporary methods of instruction instead.

It's starting to feel like déjà vu: PETA has once again filed formal complaints with the federal government about the abuse of animals in laboratories at the University of Colorado–Denver (CU). Through a state open-records request, PETA has just learned that the same neglect and incompetence that we documented there in a 2007 investigation are still occurring.

The records show that during just the past two years, at least 60 animal welfare incidents—dozens of which may constitute violations of federal law and guidelines—have occurred, including the following:

• A worker broke a rabbit's back as the rabbit struggled against the worker's restraint. The paralyzed animal was still used in an experiment before she was finally killed.
• Experimenters induced cancer in animals and then ineptly cut off the resulting tumors, leaving the animals—who were given no pain relief—with large, gaping wounds.
• Live mice and rats were found in a freezer where dead animals were discarded.
• Twenty guinea pigs died or were killed after a worker injected them with an antibiotic intended for rats.
• A careless employee threw a box of live animals into the trash, leaving the animals to die slowly.

Based on PETA's undercover investigation, in 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited CU for serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act and also issued the university an official warning letting it know that it would be fined $10,000 per incident if it were found violating the law again. It's time for the government to follow through on that warning and stop CU's abuses for good.

How You Can Help  

Please ask the federal government to stop funding cruel animal experiments and to put your tax dollars toward modern, humane non-animal research methods.

A new PETA ad campaign is rolling out in St. Louis to make sure that Washington University's faculty, staff, students, and supporters don't forget about the school's use of live cats for painful and terrifying medical training conducted in conjunction with St. Louis Children's Hospital. 

Washington University folks will be confronted by images of cats like those who have tubes forced down their throats in the university's Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course (most other PALS courses have upgraded to modern, sophisticated simulators) pretty much everywhere they look:

• In Their Newspapers
  Both the Washington University newspaper and the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offer this reminder of the shameful practice: 

© iStockphoto.com/Dan Brandenburg

• While Filling Up
  Gas stations near the campus will feature this hard-to-miss ad on top of their pumps:

© iStockphoto.com/Grigoriy Lukyanov

• Online
  Even if people stay home, this Google ad should grab their attention:

How You Can Help These Cats

Please join us in telling Washington University and St. Louis Children's Hospital that it's time to get with the program and scratch cruelty to cats out of their curriculum.

Ssppeeeddyy | cc by 2.0

A bit of good news from the Great White North: After years of pressure from animal rights activists—and after hearing from PETA recently—Air Canada, one of only two major North American airlines that still fly primates to laboratories, is taking steps to end the shipments. The airline has requested permission from the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) to enact a ban on transporting primates destined for experiments, a practice that the CTA currently requires Air Canada to engage in. PETA had been in contact with Air Canada about its policy as part of an international campaign to stop airlines from transporting primates to laboratories, where they will be caged, experimented on, and killed. 

Recently, PETA exposed appalling cruelty to monkeys at one of the largest importers of primates in the U.S.—Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL) in Everett, Washington—after being contacted by a distraught worker there. The photos and video footage recorded by the whistleblower show sick, distressed monkeys suffering after being injected with chemicals and subjected to violent handling.

Please support the growing number of compassionate and progressive airlines—including Delta, American Airlines, and British Airways—that are saying "No" to primate abuse, and click here to ask the Canadian Transport Authority to grant Air Canada's request to ban the shipment of primates to labs.

Last week, champagne corks were popping at PETA HQ following the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) announcement that it is suspending funding for new experiments on chimpanzees because most of these studies are as scientifically unjustifiable as they are morally bankrupt.  

Now we want to make certain that the rest of the vile vivisection industry gets the message too. So we purchased stock in the notorious private contract laboratory BIOQUAL for the express purpose of introducing a shareholder resolution calling on the company to stop tormenting chimpanzees in experiments.

For all you animal rights historians, BIOQUAL used to be called SEMA and was the site of a famous 1987 nighttime raid that blew the lid off the abysmal conditions for chimpanzees in laboratories. Video footage taken inside the facility revealed that baby chimpanzees were locked individually in tiny steel boxes in rooms so dark that employees had to bring flashlights to check on them. Following the release of the footage, Jane Goodall visited the laboratory and was so horrified that she called for its closure, describing it as "one of the very worst."

Apparently, not much has changed at BIOQUAL in the last quarter century. In one recent experiment at the facility, six young chimpanzees were separated from their mothers, locked in individual cages, and exposed to norovirus, which causes diarrhea, vomiting, and stomach pain. The chimpanzees—who were as young as 2 years old—were then subjected to months of painful biopsies in which pieces of their organs were removed. The recent Institute of Medicine report determined that norovirus is one of the many diseases for which chimpanzees are not needed in order to find a cure.

While we hit BIOQUAL's boardroom to try to talk some sense into the hard-hearted execs there, you can help chimpanzees by clicking here to ask your members of Congress to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would prohibit all invasive experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes.

Written by Jeremy Beckham