Written by Jeff Mackey
The end is near for the military's cruel trauma training exercises, in which thousands of animals are maimed and killed each year!
PETA has discovered—and the U.S. Army's Office of the Surgeon General has confirmed—that the Army has implemented a major shift in policy that states, "Non-medical personnel are not authorized to participate in training that involves the use of animal models." These nonmedical service members, who previously were allowed to abuse and kill animals in these drills, will now be taught exclusively using non-animal "alternatives such as commercial training manikins, moulaged actors, cadavers, or virtual simulators."
This will likely prevent thousands of animals from being shot, cut apart, and killed each year in crude exercises like the disturbing military training drill that PETA exposed last year showing live goats who had their limbs broken and cut off.
But that's not all: According to the Army, this change is just one of several that will be unveiled as a result of a series of meetings that began in February about restructuring the military's medical training program. The shift is likely in response to PETA supporters' protests, as well as Congress' request that the Department of Defense (DOD) submit a detailed plan for the phase-out of all animal use in medical training drills in favor modern non-animal methods. That report, which has already been delayed once, is now due in early summer. We'll keep you posted as we learn more about the military's broader plans to make all its deadly animal laboratories history.
What You Can Do
This is momentous progress, but we're not done yet. Please urge military officials to end the cruel use of animals in training for all personnel immediately.
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.
Originally posted on May 24th:
We've told you previously how the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston was cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) after PETA filed a complaint detailing the egregious abuse of animals in its laboratories. After obtaining internal documents revealing hellish conditions for animals in laboratories at the facility, PETA filed another complaint earlier this year—and now UTMB has been cited for the second time in 15 months for flagrant violations of the Animal Welfare Act, including failure to provide sick and injured animals with adequate veterinary care.
Following the initial successful complaint to the USDA (based on information provided by a laboratory insider), PETA submitted a Texas Freedom of Information Act request to UTMB asking for documents related to the treatment of animals in its laboratories. UTMB initially tried to use various legal exemptions to avoid releasing the records, but PETA's attorneys successfully argued the case, leading the Texas attorney general to order UTMB to hand over the documents.
Those documents revealed neglectful treatment of animals that had gone previously undetected by federal inspectors and that PETA identified and communicated to the USDA in March 2012, prompting the agency to cite UTMB for violations of federal law. The following are a couple of examples:
These heartbreaking stories show that animal experimenters—even those at supposedly top-tier institutions like UTMB—can't be trusted to abide by even the minimal standards of the Animal Welfare Act. As long as animals continue to suffer in laboratories, PETA will continue to be vigilant in monitoring what experimenters are doing. Animals in laboratories need each of us to stop the cruelty in laboratories at UTMB—and everywhere else!
Please urge Shriners International—which has funded UTMB's burn experiments on animals for more than 30 years—to stop supporting this cruelty.
Members of PETA's research staff worked with current and former military medical officers to survey officials in all 28 NATO countries regarding their military medical training programs, and now their findings—showing that more than three-quarters of those nations do not use any animals—have been published in the August issue of Military Medicine, the prestigious journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the U.S. The study's publication is just the most recent advance in PETA's campaign to end archaic, cruel, and deadly trauma training exercises by U.S. armed forces.
The 22 enlightened countries—among which are France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain—rely exclusively on a variety of non-animal training methods, including the use of lifelike human simulators in realistic battlefield scenarios.
Just six NATO countries, including (sadly) the U.S. and Canada, continue to use animals in invasive and often deadly procedures. Each year, the U.S. military and its contractors shoot, stab, mutilate, and kill more than 10,000 live animals in barbaric and antiquated trauma training exercises, even though modern simulators that breathe and bleed have been shown to better prepare doctors and medics to treat injured humans than animal laboratories.
As the study's authors state:
Although animal use in [military medical training] continues in some NATO countries, the overwhelming majority avoid this practice, which illustrates alternatives to the use of animals are available and that animal use is not essential.
Tell Congress that it's time to catch up to our allies and completely replace the use of animals in military trauma training with superior non-animal training methods.
Written by Michelle Kretzer
The movement to end vivisection is gaining more allies every year as groups like PETA continue to find creative new ways to expose the cruelty that millions of mice, rats, dogs, primates, and other animals are forced to endure in laboratories. The proof is in the numbers!
PETA, along with researchers from the University of Alabama–Birmingham and Manhattanville College, studied the results of independent Gallup polls conducted from 2001 to 2011, in each of which approximately 1,000 Americans were asked whether they found "medical testing on animals" to be "morally acceptable" or "morally wrong." The results are heartening: Opposition to animal testing increased overall, across all age groups and political affiliations and both genders.
According to the surveys, the majority of adults ages 18 to 29 and the majority of women are opposed to animal testing. And nearly half of all adults don't approve of the fact that animals are burned, poisoned, and hacked apart in laboratories.
The study (which is just one of the many that PETA's team of scientists has published in peer-reviewed journals) makes one thing abundantly clear: The tide is turning in favor of getting animals out of laboratories.
Help us make sure that public policies evolve with society's growing compassion for animals. Please e-mail your senators and representatives and ask them to stand with their constituents and stop funneling taxpayer money into cruel experiments on animals.
Update: As another indicator of the decline in the demand for its cruel services, just one month after Covance announced that it would be closing its animal-testing laboratory in Chandler, Arizona, the company has announced that it will also be laying off 50 employees at its facility in Madison, Wisconsin, where thousands of primates and other animals endure painful and lethal tests every year.
Just three years after it opened following a long battle with PETA and local citizens, a laboratory owned by a notorious animal testing company, Covance, in Chandler, Arizona, is closing because of lack of demand for its cruel and deadly services.
Shutting Down Cruelty …
When plans to build the Chandler facility were uncovered in 2005, PETA worked with outraged local residents to try to stop it and managed to delay its construction. The world's largest contract testing laboratory, Covance subjects animals to painful and deadly tests of cosmetics ingredients, personal and household products, food additives, industrial chemicals, and drugs. Covance is also the world's largest breeder of dogs and the largest U.S. importer of primates to be tormented and killed in experiments.
Despite media censorship, word clearly got around about the horrendous cruelty found inside Covance's laboratories, including physical and psychological abuse of primates and lack of veterinary care for sick and injured animals.
The shutdown of the Arizona facility follows the 2010 closure of a Covance lab in Virginia, where shocking abuse of animals was exposed by a PETA undercover investigation. Around that same time, Covance scrapped plans to build a massive facility elsewhere in Virginia that PETA had urged officials to reject.
… But Keeping Up the Pressure
These closures will save countless monkeys, dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, and other animals from suffering, but Covance is still in business, so PETA's work goes on, including a recent protest at the company's annual meeting, where PETA also presented a resolution calling on the company to make animal welfare improvements.
Ready to help animals in laboratories? Learn how—and be sure to follow PETA on Twitter to learn about more opportunities to get active.
We've told you before how cats and ferrets suffer in archaic training courses at Washington University in St. Louis. Now, we've obtained a photo of the miserable living conditions for a monkey named George, who is also confined to this facility:
Information on who is experimenting on George was not released, but we wonder if it might have been Dora Angelaki, who has been crowned Vivisector of the Month for the month of June. Angelaki, who recently left Washington University to become chair of the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, drills screws into monkeys' skulls and implants a "head ring," which attaches to an apparatus to control the animals' heads. She also implants coils into their eyes and electrodes into their ears before strapping the monkeys to a chair designed to immobilize their bodies as they are spun and shaken so that Angelaki can observe their ability to track a target. In some cases, she damages parts of the monkeys' brains first. Angelaki has received more than $18 million in federal tax money for her primate experiments.
While Angelaki has left Washington University, there are still animals there who need your help. Please urge the school to end the use of animals in cruel and archaic intubation training exercises and replace them with modern, effective teaching methods.
The U.S. Army's plans to use animals in trauma training are enough to make a goat faint. The army is in the market to buy up to 3,600 goats to torment and kill in exercises like those seen in this shocking undercover video, which PETA released last month. The video, sent to us by a brave whistleblower, shows instructors as they saw off live goats' limbs with tree trimmers and crudely cut open the animals' abdomens and yank out their organs. Goats moan loudly and kick during the procedures.
Goats are intelligent, inquisitive, social animals who can quickly learn to open latches on farm gates and let themselves out. Moms and kids share a strong bond and have been known to recognize each other even if they have been separated for years.
The Army plans to mutilate thousands of goats even though high-tech human simulators are readily available and offer soldiers superior training in how to treat wounds in the field.
You can help: Send PETA's two goat images included here to the Army and urge it to save thousands of goats from suffering and dying in cruel trauma training exercises by using modern simulators instead. The Army is accepting bids only until June 11, so please act now!
Note: Please do not use the words "goat" or "goats" in your e-mail to the Army because it seems to be blocking e-mails with those words in them.
PETA has been on pharmaceutical company Amgen's case for years over the company's stubborn refusal to more actively implement alternatives to animal experiments, among other things. But we're riding high this week after pulling a fast one at Amgen's Tour of California Bike Race.
Amgen sponsored the massive race and had its branding everywhere, but so did we:
PETA got the last laugh near the finish line. As the racers flew by and the news cameras flashed, two stealthily placed staffers whipped out signs about Amgen's animal abuse and held them high for the crowd to see:
It's time for Amgen to join in the race to replace animal tests with modern science.
Exciting news from our pals at PETA India! Following that group's extensive campaign, the Indian government has issued guidelines to the Medical Council of India, the Pharmacy Council of India, and the University Grants Commission instructing them to completely stop dissection and experimentation on animals to train both undergraduate and postgraduate students and use non-animal methods of teaching instead.
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This campaign was hard-fought. In addition to writing letters to the Ministry of Environment and Forests (which issued the guidelines) and the entities mentioned above, efforts included gathering petition signatures from university students, letters from and meetings held by progressive scientists, and work by other caring individuals as well as online outreach, celebrity involvement, media pressure, and demonstrations. And of course, the PETA Foundation's administrative, fundraising, and finance departments helped keep the campaign afloat.
Another key to this victory was a recent brainstorming session among government scientists and other researchers in which PETA India participated, making the point that animals are not required in order to train students. Indeed, as the ministry said in issuing the guidelines, "Nowadays effective alternatives in the form of CDs, computer simulations, manikin/models, in vitro methods, etc are available and they are not only effective and absolute replacements to the use of animals in teaching anatomy/physiology but they are also superior pedagogic tools in the teaching of pharmacy/life sciences."
Countless animals continue to suffer and die in laboratories at U.S. colleges and universities—please take action to persuade the U.S. to follow India's compassionate and forward-thinking example.
Where others see problems, PETA sees possibilities. Case in point: The Kennedy Space Center is looking for tenants for some of its facilities left vacant by the end of the shuttle program, so PETA has inquired about renting a vacant repair hangar or other building there—so that we can turn it into a memorial for the chimpanzees (in)famously abused for violent crash tests and experimental flights in the U.S. space program.
Courtesy of NASA
While NASA may have made the compassionate decision to stop experimenting on chimpanzees decades ago—more than a half-century after a chimpanzee named Ham was subjected to painful tests and then fired into space—nearly 1,000 of these highly intelligent and social animals continue to be tortured in laboratories across the country. PETA's proposed memorial would allow NASA to acknowledge its part in this shameful history—including the unfortunate role that the agency's breeding program had in creating a population of captive chimpanzees who subsequently spent decades being tormented in labs and whose offspring are still locked up—while helping to bring attention to the need for the United States to join every other industrialized nation on Earth in banning experiments on chimpanzees.
Toward that end, more than 160 senators and representatives have already signed on to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act. Passage of this important legislation would permanently end the use of chimpanzees and all other great apes in invasive experiments, retire federally owned apes to sanctuaries—where many chimpanzee refugees from the space program are already lucky enough to reside—and save taxpayers millions of dollars a year.
Please contact your U.S. senators and representative and urge them to cosponsor the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (H.R. 1513/S. 810) if they haven't already and to make sure that it becomes law.
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.
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