Written by Jeff Mackey
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!
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.
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.
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.
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
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:
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.
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:
© iStockphoto.com/Dan Brandenburg
© iStockphoto.com/Grigoriy Lukyanov
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.
Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post
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.
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.
Click here to ask the Canadian Transport Authority to grant Air Canada’s request to ban the shipment of primates to labs
Written by PETA
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
Written by Michelle Sherrow
Just hours after the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM) announced the findings of its long-awaited report on the scientific validity of experiments on chimpanzees, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which commissioned the report, announced that it was suspending funding for any new experiments on chimpanzees. All currently funded experiments on chimpanzees will be re-evaluated, and funding for many may end.
You may remember that we testified at the IOM committee's hearing on the issue last summer. The committee listened to us and to the scientists who testified and concluded that "most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary."
© Smileus | iStockPhoto.com
NIH had originally commissioned the study in response to the outcry from PETA and other animal protection groups when the agency tried to pull more than 200 chimpanzees out of retirement at the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico and send them back to laboratories. PETA, politicians, and other animal advocates stopped the move, and now, none of the chimpanzees at Alamorgordo, or any other NIH-owned chimpanzees not currently enrolled in experiments, can be used pending a further review by NIH.
This may well be the beginning of the end of chimpanzee experimentation. However, until these experiments are permanently banned, hundreds of chimpanzees are still in peril, which is why it remains vital that Congress pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would phase out the use of all chimpanzees in invasive experiments and permanently retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, where they could live in peace at last. You can help by clicking here to urge your congressional representatives to pass this groundbreaking law and end the use of all great apes in experiments.
A new experiment has once again shown that rats in laboratories have empathy for one another. In the experiment, one rat was placed in a cage with another rat who was stuffed into a tiny tube from which he or she was unable to escape. The "free" rat worked frantically to get his or her distressed friend out, even when a tempting chocolate treat was offered as a distraction.
This is far from the first time that altruism has been seen in animals used for experimentation. In one notoriously cruel experiment, macaque monkeys were given food only if they pulled a chain that electrically shocked another monkey. Nearly all the monkeys preferred to go hungry, and one macaque starved himself for 12 days. Monkeys who had previously been shocked were even more reluctant to pull the chain and subject another individual to such punishment. In PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk's book The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights, she quotes astronomer Carl Sagan, who asks, "If the circumstances were reversed, and captive humans were offered the same deal by macaque scientists, would we do as well?"
Millions of kind, intelligent rats and other animals are poisoned, blinded, and killed every year in cruel experiments. You can show your empathy by clicking here to urge members of Congress to amend the Animal Welfare Act to include the protection of both rats and mice. Also, please only support companies and charities that don't test on animals.
Written by Monica Alexander
After more than a year of campaigning by PETA and supporters—and a day after the release of a shocking PETA exposé—the University of Michigan (U-M) announced that it has ended the use of cats in its Survival Flight intubation training laboratory.
More than 100,000 people—including Michigan natives Iggy Pop and Lily Tomlin—called on U-M to replace crude and cruel live-animal laboratories with more humane and effective human simulators, which are already used for other U-M courses. The U-M student group Michigan Animal Rights Society led demonstrations in support of the effort, the student assembly passed a resolution urging the school to end the laboratories, and the student newspaper editorial board came out in favor of replacing animals with simulators. PETA supporters even jammed university circuit boards with phone calls to protest the Survival Flight animal laboratories.
U-M says that it still plans to harm and kill pigs to teach other skills in the Survival Flight training course, and PETA will continue to push the school to replace all animal use with simulators that are already available on campus.
Of course, this victory would not have been possible without the help of our supporters. Help us keep up the momentum by clicking here to urge St. Louis Children's Hospital to join U-M and nearly every other facility in the country by replacing the use of animals with simulators for intubation training.
He was a pretty, healthy, brown tabby cat when his guardians took him to a Michigan animal shelter in the hope of finding him a new home. But a heartless shelter director, a shady animal dealer, and a university hell-bent on abusing animals in crude and painful medical training exercises took away his chance at a happy ending.
Knowing full well that he would end up in a lab, the staff at Gratiot County Animal Shelter turned the cat over to notorious Class B animal dealer R&R Research, which in turn sold him to the University of Michigan (U-M). There, he was given the ID number 8269 and tormented in Survival Flight training labs for nurses by having hard plastic tubes repeatedly shoved down his delicate windpipe. A few days later, when U-M was done abusing 8269, they killed him. Another cat who was subjected to this cruel intubation laboratory, 8312, had been obtained from someone who gave her away "free to a good home." The cat was illegally acquired by R&R before being sold to U-M.
The stories of 8269 and the other cats killed by U-M were uncovered when PETA obtained records from Gratiot County and U-M. They reveal that U-M officials—including the director of the Survival Flight program—have shamelessly lied to the public by repeatedly stating in a newspaper opinion column, comments to the media, and official statements that the cats used in the archaic Survival Flight lab are always adopted out afterward.
While we were shocked to learn about U-M's illicit relationship with one of the most despicable animal dealers in the country and to discover that U-M has been blatantly lying about the fate of the cats, it really shouldn't have come as any surprise. U-M officials have been misleadingly claiming for a year that modern human-patient simulators can't replace the cat laboratories, even though these simulators are already used in the place of animals to teach intubation to doctors and nurses in other courses at U-M.
You can help prevent more cats from being betrayed like 8269 by clicking here to e-mail U-M officials and demanding that they replace the use of cats in these labs with the superior human-patient simulators that the school already owns.
Follow PETA on Twitter!
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.