With the Budget Control Act of 2011's 7.8 percent cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on track to kick in at the start of 2013, PETA is urging Congress to take a more drastic measure—cut all funding for wasteful experiments on animals. 

In a letter sent today to congressional leaders, PETA explains that nearly half of NIH's current $30 billion annual research budget is awarded to projects that involve cruel experiments on animals, which do nothing to advance human health and which contribute to the country's expanding deficit. These projects include cruel and costly experiments like these:

• The University of California–San Francisco receives more than $360,000 a year in federal largesse for erectile dysfunction experiments in which rats have their penises cut apart before being killed.
• Columbia University gets half a million dollars a year to addict female monkeys to crack and cocaine in order to see how their drug use is affected by their menstrual cycle.
• The University of Wisconsin–Madison receives more than $330,000 a year for a project in which chicken eggs are injected with pure alcohol to see how the exposure affects baby chicks.
• Oregon Health & Science University—which already bears responsibility for the infamous (and lethal) "gay sheep" experiments—collects more than $2 million a year for a project that includes examining whether the offspring of obese female monkeys are more frightened of Mr. Potato Head dolls than are children of non-obese mothers.

That last one is no joke …

… but it has a sick punch line: Because animal species differ from one another biologically in many significant ways, experiments on animals almost never produce results that can be applied to humans in a meaningful way.

What You Can Do

Please tell your representatives in Washington to stop wasting lives, money, and opportunities on cruel and ineffective experiments on animals.

PETA's Air Cruelty campaign has flown from success to success, and it's still soaring—three top cargo shipping companies have joined the still-growing list of carriers that refuse to transport any animals to be burned, blinded, poisoned, and cut up alive in laboratories!

iStockphoto.com/EcoPic 

Compassion Takes Wing

As reported in Nature magazine, after talks with PETA, UPS adopted a worldwide ban on transporting animals destined for laboratory experiments. FedEx (already our hero for its role in helping Ben the bear get his freedom) and DHL have also confirmed to PETA that they have policies in place that ban the shipment of live animals to laboratories.

To give you an idea of how big a development this is, FedEx and UPS are the world's top two largest cargo airlines, and DHL is close behind. They join the majority of major airlines—including Cathay Pacific, Korean Airlines, Qantas, and others—that won't transport any animals destined for experiments.

What You Can Do

Animals aren't safe from being caged, neglected, and tortured as long as even one airline will deliver them into experimenters' hands. Please urge holdout airlines such as Air France and United to step up and refuse to ship primates to laboratories.

Pop the corks on those champagne bottles test tubes! After more than five years of discussions among PETA, the Intel Corporation, and the Society for Science & the Public (SSP) concerning cruel and deadly experiments on animals conducted by high school students participating in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair [http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/] (ISEF), the world's largest pre-collegiate science competition, the event has implemented a new policy banning experiments in which any animals die or are intentionally killed.

This is great news since it's estimated that in 2011 alone, thousands of vertebrate animals likely died in experiments conducted by students who were competing in regional science fairs around the world in the hope of making it to the ISEF finals. Seven million high school students participate in these fairs each year.  

Groundwork Leads to Groundbreaking Victory

For years, high school students competing in ISEF-affiliated science fairs around the world have conducted and participated in invasive and deadly experiments on animals, such as addicting animals to cocaine, inflicting brain injuries on them, injecting them with toxic chemicals, and inducing strokes in animals and then cutting them open. To stop these cruel experiments, PETA has been working with Intel and SSP since 2007 with considerable success. Prior to the new ban on deadly experiments, SSP (which organizes ISEF)—after discussions with PETA and Intel (which sponsors ISEF)—adopted a formal statement in 2010 in favor of modern alternatives to animal experiments. 

How to Help Animals in School Laboratories

Psyched about this victory? Use the buttons below to "like" it, tweet about it, and otherwise spread the word. And if you want to cut dissection and other lab-based cruelty out of your school's curriculum, get all the details at peta2.com.

Thanks to guidance from PETA-funded scientists, Chinese officials are now in the final stages of approving the country's first non-animal testing method for cosmetics ingredients.

stefan1234/iStockphoto.com

The 3T3 Neutral Red Uptake Phototoxicity Assay, which tests chemicals for their potential toxicity when they come into contact with sunlight—and which is already in widespread use in the U.S. and the E.U.—is expected to be accepted in China by late summer.

Last summer, when we discovered that China was requiring animal tests for cosmetics to be funded by cosmetics companies—including Avon, Estée Lauder, and Mary Kay, which for years had been on PETA's list of companies that don't test cosmetics on animals—PETA awarded a grant to scientists at the Institute for In Vitro Sciences. These scientists traveled to China several times to offer their expertise and guidance in replacing animal-based tests—which are cruel and unreliable—with non-animal alternatives.

PETA is delighted to have helped jump-start the acceptance of non-animal tests in China and congratulates Chinese officials for acting swiftly to implement the first in a wide range of non-animal tests!

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.

It has been exactly 30 years since PETA's historic Silver Spring monkeys case thrust the animal rights movement into mainstream consciousness in the summer of 1981. PETA's first undercover investigation led to many other firsts—the first search-and-seizure warrant to be served on a U.S. laboratory, the first confiscation from a laboratory of abused animals, and the first cruelty-to-animals conviction of an experimenter.

Those 17 macaque monkeys carried much of the weight of the animal rights movement on their backs. When we found the Silver Spring monkeys at the Institute for Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, many of them were being used in a crude experiment in which their spinal nerves were severed, making it difficult or impossible for them to move one of their arms. The experimenter, Edward Taub, starved them, used surgical pliers to pinch their skin, and gave them electric shocks to try to force them to use their disabled limbs to get food. They had lost most of the fur on their tails to malnutrition.

The trauma of the cruel, invasive experiments and intense confinement to rusty, broken, and mold- and feces-encrusted cages was so severe that many of them had ripped off their own flesh and were left to suffer from open, festering wounds. Many of the monkeys had lost their fingers to the jagged, broken, and rusty wires that protruded into the tiny, uncomfortable space where they had to sit and lie.

PETA pursued the Silver Spring monkeys case for more than a decade—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although we prevailed in getting some of the monkeys into a group indoor/outdoor space away from public view at the San Diego Zoo, some of them—including Augustus, for whom PETA's Augustus donor club is named—were turned over to another laboratory, anesthetized, experimented on, and killed.

But because the Silver Spring monkeys case forced the cruelty of animal experimentation into the spotlight, it paved the way for many victories for animals. In 1993, PETA persuaded General Motors to become the first company to stop using animals in automobile crash tests, and other companies soon followed until those horrendous experiments were eradicated. At PETA's urging, Revlon and Estée Lauder became the first mainstream corporations to end animal testing, and since then more than 950 household, cosmetics, and personal-care companies have followed suit. And just in the past year, after another PETA investigation, animal testing hellhole Professional Laboratory and Research Services, Inc., shut its doors and surrendered its animals, and four of its workers were indicted on felony cruelty-to-animals charges (another first for animals in laboratories). 

The Silver Spring monkeys (and some of the people who helped rescue them) are all at peace now, but their legacy will continue to lead to more groundbreaking changes for animals for many years to come.

Written by Michelle Sherrow

mourner/CC by 2.0

UPDATE: Unilever—the the world's largest tea maker, which makes the Lipton and PG Tips brands—has agreed to halt all animal tests. Please read here for more info.

If you're sipping Lipton, it was. The makers of Lipton tea have conducted (or paid others to conduct) painful, invasive tests on hundreds of animals—possibly more. Here are some of the details: 

• Rabbits were fed a high-fat diet and then given tea to see if it affected the plaque that had formed on the animals' arteries. After the experiment, the rabbits were decapitated.
• Mice were fed tea ingredients to see if they had any effect on bowel inflammation. After the test, experimenters killed the mice by suffocating them or breaking their necks.
• Rats were forced to eat a high-sugar diet, and then tea was given to the animals to see if it had an impact on their sugar-induced brain damage.
• Piglets were infected with E. coli toxin and then fed tea in order to see if the tea affected diarrhea. Experimenters cut the pigs' intestines apart while the animals were still alive.

None of these tests were required by law. In fact, regulators have stated that animal tests are not sufficient to prove a health claim about a product.

Please take a moment and urge the makers of Lipton to stop the crueltea to animals and to use modern, non-animal testing methods instead, just as Honest Tea, Stash, Twinings, Luzianne, and other tea companies already do.

Written by Alisa Mullins

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rob-qld/ / CC BY 2.0

In July 2008, PETA received an anonymous letter reporting that "many monkeys" had died at Charles River Laboratory's (CRL) Sparks, Nevada, facility because of a heating system malfunction. We immediately filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which opened an investigation. After the incident, CRL was fined $10,000 for the death of 32 monkeys—and then went right back to selling and experimenting on millions of animals.

Jumping forward to earlier this year, another horror story broke from behind the walls of a CRL lab in Reno, Nevada. Employees at this facility carelessly ran a monkey through a high-temperature cage washer and boiled him alive. CRL was once again fined, this time for $4,000.

Now news outlets across the country are reporting on the combined $14,000 in fines for the deaths of these 33 monkeys—who were forced to endure the excruciating pain of being cooked alive because of employee ineptitude—and people everywhere are crying out for tighter regulations.

Compared to the usual slap on the wrist that abusive companies receive, these fines are hefty. But for a billion-dollar corporation with a long and sordid history of violating federal animal protection laws—and the iniquitous distinction of being the world's largest tester and supplier of animals for use in experimentation—they're like parking tickets. CRL is responsible for the imprisoning, poisoning, mutilating, and killing of literally tens of millions of animals—from mice to dogs to monkeys—in its own laboratories and those of its customers.

While the deaths of these monkeys have shined some light on the horrors that occur inside CRL, it is the everyday operations of this company and others like it that cause animals the most suffering and death.

Lets's hope that CRL's recent closing of a testing facility in Massachusetts is a sign of things to come for the entire nasty company.

Written by Logan Scherer

© Star Max Inc.

"Ready …
Set …
Um, never mind …"

It seems quite possible that Animal Planet's upcoming reality series starring Mike Tyson might be knocked out of production. (Join us in our sorrow—not.) PETA has identified what might be a fatal flaw in the very premise of Taking on Tyson, which is scheduled to begin filming in Brooklyn next month. See, while pigeon racing is cruel to birds no matter where it takes place, in New York state it's also very likely illegal.

Our letter to Charles J. Hynes, Kings County district attorney, points out that gambling is generally prohibited in New York state—as are races using animals other than horses in which any bet, stake, or reward is involved. Translation: When it comes to racing pigeons in Brooklyn, all bets are off possibly illegal. What's more, trainers are prohibited from making money off such races, and this rule might very well apply to any compensation that Tyson is receiving from Animal Planet.

Considering its inherent cruelties, there's no question that pigeon racing should be illegal. Birds who are forced to race often struggle to survive extreme heat, hail, and thunderstorms, dodging both predators and cruel humans through grueling races that can be as long as 500 miles. Those who somehow do not succumb to exhaustion or injury and make their way home may still have their necks wrung by unsatisfied trainers.

Take a minute to write Animal Planet and politely let the network know that while you love shows like Whale Wars and Animal Cops—programs in which people go to bat for animals—a program in which people bet on cruelty is a bad hand for everyone.

Written by Shawna Flavell

static.squidoo / CC

A few weeks ago, we were thrilled to report that Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) agreed to stop using homeless cats obtained from Odessa Animal Control in deadly medical training exercises, but we weren't sure whether or not Texas Tech had abandoned the practice of shoving plastic tubes down the throats of cats altogether. Well, now it's official: News reports confirm that TTUHSC will no longer use cats for this training! I'm sure our rejected newspaper ads and celebrity support played a big part in securing this towering triumph, but the victory really belongs to the more than 30,000 (!) compassionate people who took action against TTUHSC.

With 2010 fast approaching, we've got a lot to celebrate, but there are still countless animals who are being tortured and killed in experiments. Let's start the New Year by riding on the wave of our TTUHSC success and bringing the same support to the more than two dozen monkeys whom NASA intends to torture by exposing them to massive doses of dangerous radiation. Urge NASA to cancel its cruel plans and instead direct its funds to humane methods of scientific inquiry. Here's to starting 2010 with another victory!

Written by Logan Scherer