UPDATE: Santa is making his rounds early this year, and this time, he's come through for more than 100 chimpanzees "owned" by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who are being released from the horrendous New Iberia Research Center. Following pleas by PETA and many others, NIH—after initially announcing a misguided plan to send most of the chimpanzees to a notorious Texas laboratory—has now declared that all the animals will instead be properly retired to a sanctuary!

While this means a truly happy new year (with more to come) for the New Iberia chimpanzees, many others remain in miserable laboratories, where they are subjected to physically and mentally traumatic experiments and captivity. Do like old St. Nick and give them a gift this holiday season: Urge the government to retire all its chimpanzees to sanctuaries.

Originally posted on September 23rd: 

More than 100 chimpanzees will soon be freed from laboratory cages after years of pressure by PETA and other animal protection groups led the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to announce that it will be permanently retiring all the federally "owned" chimpanzees at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana, making them off limits for future experimentation.

The announcement follows a landmark report issued last year by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which concluded that "most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary." In the wake of that report, NIH announced that it was suspending funding for any new experiments on chimpanzees and that it would be reevaluating currently funded experiments on chimpanzees.

It seems that NIH is making good on its promise.

PETA has campaigned for the release of chimpanzees from laboratories for decades. In addition to publicizing video footage showing the abuse of chimpanzees in laboratories, PETA successfully campaigned for the permanent retirement of the more than 200 chimpanzees held at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. We also submitted comments to and testified before the NAS, and we submitted official comments to NIH this spring outlining recommendations for the agency's implementation of the NAS report, including calling for the retirement of all chimpanzees in laboratories.

While NIH's announcement marks a tremendous step forward, hundreds more chimpanzees—in federally funded and private laboratories—must still be retired.

Please urge your congressional representatives to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees and retire all federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries.

PETA is asking the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to take back money awarded to the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF) for cruel experiments on monkeys in which federal animal welfare laws were repeatedly violated.

Lack of Care for Animals—and the Law

In 2011, federal inspectors cited UCSF for two violations of animal welfare laws over the school's abuse of a monkey named Petra, who is pictured below:

Photo: PETA via USDA
Petra

UCSF was cited for continuing to torment Petra in a cruel brain experiment for nearly two years despite her deteriorating health and for failing to remove surgically implanted hardware from Petra's skull, as the experimenters were required to do.

Internal UCSF records obtained by PETA reveal that Petra developed a terrible bacterial infection in the wound where her head was cut open. She rapidly began to lose weight, circled endlessly in her cage, and ripped out her own hair—a common behavior in primates imprisoned in laboratories. Primates are highly social animals, but in laboratories, they are often isolated in small stainless-steel cages as Petra was. As a result, they suffer from severe depression and boredom. 

UCSF Pockets Money, but Petra Pays the Price

NIH policy prohibits spending grant money on experiments that violate federal animal welfare laws. Yet NIH awarded UCSF more than $2.1 million just during the period when Petra was abused, so PETA is urging NIH to demand the return of these funds.  UCSF is no stranger to violating federal animal welfare laws. In 2005, UCSF paid more than $90,000 for dozens of violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which is one of the largest fines ever paid by an animal laboratory. 

What You Can Do

Please contact the NIH and ask that they demand UCSF repay funds awarded during the period when experimenters violated the law by abusing Petra. Are animals like Petra suffering in your school's laboratories? Help save animals from misery and death in experiments by urging your alma mater to stop experimenting on animals.

Students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) likely had no idea that as they made their way to class, they were passing by a laboratory in which cats, exactly like the ones many of the students would return home to, were being tormented and killed in gruesome experiments. But PETA set out to show the students exactly what was going on behind closed doors on their campus and to enlist their support to get the experiments stopped.

UW experimenters did not want information about their cruel sound localization experiments on cats to be released, and they fought PETA for more than three years to try to keep the information under wraps. But we sued the school for release of the disturbing pictures taken of the laboratory's feline victims—and got the photos.  

PETA members marched onto campus holding signs emblazoned with the graphic images of Double Trouble, one of the many cats UW abused. UW faculty drilled holes into Double Trouble's head, screwed a steel post to her skull, implanted electrodes in her brain, and put coils in her eyes. They dripped toxic chemicals into her ears to deafen her, then implanted devices in both ears. During at least two of these surgeries, Double Trouble's anesthesia was inadequate, and she woke up or was conscious and likely in pain.

Experimenters immobilized Double Trouble's head and made her try to locate sounds coming from different directions. They starved her for days in order to make her cooperate during these experiments in exchange for a piece of food. When the experimenters were done using Double Trouble, they killed and decapitated her.

And after all the pain and trauma that Double Trouble was subjected to, the experimenters admitted that the project was a failure. Meanwhile, institutions around the world study how the brain locates sounds by using advanced methods with human volunteers.

Many UW students signed PETA's petition asking the National Institutes of Health to stop giving the school taxpayer money to fund these cruel experiments. You can, too.

St. Louis drivers who stop to fill up their tanks will get an eyeful of Washington University in St. Louis' cruelty to cats. PETA has placed hard-hitting ads on top of the pumps at seven gas stations near the campus to show the university's students, faculty, and alumni that the school uses cats like most of us use cars—as equipment.

Instead of using modern human-patient simulators in the intubation training exercises it holds in conjunction with St. Louis Children's Hospital, trainees are asked to repeatedly force hard plastic tubes down cats' and ferrets' throats, causing their delicate windpipes to bleed, swell, and scar. Cats can even die as a result of the injuries sustained during this traumatic procedure.

© iStockphoto.com/Grigoriy Lukyanov

Drivers may pull into the gas stations lamenting "pain at the pump," but they'll leave disgusted by the pain that Washington University in St. Louis is inflicting on cats. And PETA added more fuel to the fire with similar ads in newspapers and online.

If the school wants to truly honor its namesake, George Washington, who had nine companion animals at the White House, it should call off the cruel cat laboratory and switch to the modern simulators already in use at nearly every other similar facility in the country.

Italy had Leonardo da Vinci, India had Mahatma Gandhi, England had William Wilberforce, and America had Mark Twain.

Courtesy of LOC; LC-USZ62-117717

Like these other luminaries, Twain was a committed advocate for the humane treatment of animals. In honor of his 176^th birthday, we've selected one of his most powerful and impassioned statements to share. Of course, since it comes from Mark Twain, there's also a dose of humor thrown in:

To read more about Mark Twain's thoughts on animals in celebration of this early animal advocate's birthday, check out Mark Twain's Book of Animals.

The University of Utah just got slapped with an official warning from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for repeatedly violating the federal Animal Welfare Act by failing to properly review and oversee experiments on animals. If the university is caught violating this law again, it could face up to $10,000 in fines per incident.

The USDA's action was based in part on violations that were uncovered following PETA's 2009 undercover investigation that brought to light the terrible suffering of the dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, and other animals experimented on there. We documented that monkeys were deprived of water so that they would cooperate with experimenters in exchange for a sip of water, that a kitten died from dehydration, and that other sick and injured animals were denied veterinary care and left to languish and eventually die. You may recall that many of the animals the school was using in experiments were homeless cats and dogs it had purchased from local animal shelters until an intense year-long PETA campaign put an end to pound seizure in Utah. Since this landmark victory, several animal experiments at the U have been completely halted. 

You can help animals suffering at the University of Utah and in other horrendous laboratories by clicking here to ask the federal government to divert tax dollars away from cruel animal experiments and put them toward modern and humane non-animal research methods.

Do you take your tea with a dash of blood? How about a spoonful of dead mouse? PETA's new parody of a Nestea commercial from the '80s shows viewers why they should avoid the brand and "take the CruelTEA plunge":

Nestea insists on testing on mice and rats in an attempt to make health claims—despite the fact that U.S. and European regulators have stated that tests on animals are not sufficient to prove health claims about food and beverage products. One test involved locking highly social mice in dark chambers and painfully shocking their sensitive feet. In another test, experimenters injected mice with chemicals to make them develop diabetes and then force-fed them tea ingredients.

Share the new ad on Facebook and Twitter to urge everyone you know to "take the CruelTEA plunge" by pledging to drink only cruelty-free tea. Please also click here to urge Nestea to stop testing on animals. Unless you want to quench a thirst for cruelty, Nestea is one brand to avoid like the plague.

Written by Heather Faraid Drennan

After we told you earlier this week how animals were being tormented and killed in crude experiments for Nestlé's tea brand, Nestea, Nestlé went into crisis mode, furiously tweeting that its "#Nestea product has never been tested on animals." But just like Nestlé's tainted teas, you shouldn't swallow its desperate attempt to spin the ugly truth.

While Nestlé's final tea products may not be tested on animals, the ingredients of Nestlé's tea products—including Nestea—have been repeatedly tested on animals, according to published studies. But don't take our word for it—you can watch as Nestlé's own U.S. CEO admits it. In these tests, mice and rats have been poisoned, electrically shocked, surgically mutilated, and decapitated.

Nestlé claims that "[a]ll safety authorities rely on animal testing as part of the dossier that industry has to provide to demonstrate that foods are safe when there is no history of safe use" and that Nestlé's tea experiments on animals provide a basis for developing food with "novel ingredients," i.e., that its tests are conducted for safety purposes. But not only has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) written to PETA stating that it's "not aware of any circumstances that would result in the FDA requiring a food or beverage company to conduct laboratory experiments on animals," Nestlé also forced animals to ingest common tea ingredients (green tea extracts, flavonoids, catechins, etc.) to determine their health properties, not safety. In fact, none of Nestlé's published tea studies on animals that PETA identified involved tests for safety of the ingredients—meaning that Nestea's "safety" claims are false.

You can learn more and send a message to Nestlé that cruelty to animals isn't your cup of tea at NesteaCruelTea.com.

Written by Jeff Mackey