Written by Jeff Mackey
Following PETA's undercover investigation into Triple F Farms, a massive ferret-breeding operation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has fined the company nearly $17,000 for violating at least eight regulations under the Animal Welfare Act.
The violations were discovered during USDA inspections conducted in response to PETA's submission of video footage and other evidence.
Documents recently obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division show that Triple F President Jack Fallenstein also agreed to pay 28 employees more than $28,000 in back wages to settle 38 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act following a federal investigation prompted by PETA's complaint to the agency.
PETA's investigation into the ferret mill lasted nearly four months and documented systematic and often fatal neglect and abuse of ferrets. We found that Triple F owners, supervisors, and workers left newborn ferrets for dead when they fell through wire cage bottoms 3 feet onto the filthy concrete floor, housed ferrets in severely crowded conditions, and deprived ferrets with bleeding rectal prolapses, gaping wounds, herniated organs, and other painful conditions of veterinary care or euthanasia. PETA's investigator also saw ferrets thrown into the trash—and into the facility's incinerator—while still alive.
Triple F sells ferrets to pet stores and laboratories around the world. Since 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has had contracts worth more than $1.5 million with the company. The CDC signed even more contracts with this filthy factory farm after PETA shared its evidence and the USDA's findings with CDC brass. PETA has called on the agency to rescind Triple F's contracts and disqualify it from future contracts. The National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Navy have also had contracts with Triple F worth nearly $400,000.
Please urge the director of the CDC's Procurement and Grants Office to stop the agency from funneling taxpayer dollars to Triple F.
Here's some exciting news from PETA's home region of Hampton Roads, Virginia: Following more than two years of urging from PETA, the Naval Medical Center Portsmouth (NMCP) has completely replaced its cruel and crude use of ferrets for teaching lifesaving intubation skills to physicians and others with more modern and effective simulators.
Joining PETA in calling for an end to this cruel ferret laboratory were several military and civilian medical experts with firsthand knowledge about the superiority of simulators, including a pediatrician who is a former commander of NMCP. Previously, ferrets had hard plastic tubes forced down their delicate windpipes as often as 10 times per session—a procedure that can cause bleeding, swelling, pain, scarring, collapsed lungs, and even death.
NMCP joins the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Tripler Army Medical Center, William Beaumont Army Medical Center, and Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences—as well as more than 90 percent of pediatric residency programs nationwide—that have already ended the use of cats and ferrets for intubation training in favor of superior human simulators.
USFWS Mountain Prairie | cc by 2.0
Please help persuade St. Louis Children's Hospital and Washington University in St. Louis to replace painful intubation training exercises on cats and ferrets with humane and superior non-animal methods.
Written by PETA
Why would the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order up animals for experiments from a company that has repeatedly violated federal animal welfare laws? I'm not sure.
The CDC has had contracts with the now notorious Pennsylvania ferret-breeding factory farm Triple F Farms, Inc., totaling more than $1.5 million since 2006. But PETA's recent undercover investigation at Triple F found that its owners, supervisors, and employees left ferrets with bleeding rectal prolapses, gaping wounds, herniated organs, painful mammary gland infections, and ruptured, bleeding eyes to suffer and die without veterinary care. Workers threw live animals into an incinerator, and employees with no veterinary training cut organs and anal sacs from ferrets who were not given adequate pain relief. Our evidence prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to inspect Triple F repeatedly, and federal officials corroborated our findings and have opened an investigation, citing Triple F for a dozen violations of federal laws.
PETA immediately sent CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden the results of our investigation and the USDA's first damning inspection report. But the CDC, which abuses ferrets for respiratory experiments, signed another contract with Triple F, worth $16,750, just weeks later. PETA has filed an urgent complaint with the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services because the CDC's latest contract may violate a federal law requiring the government to award business contracts only to reputable and ethical companies. Click here to ask the CDC to determine whether Triple F should be made ineligible from receiving taxpayers' money because of its horrendous record of abuse and noncompliance. Written by Michelle Sherrow
Fewer exotic animals such as hedgehogs, macaws, and lizards will spend their lives locked in cages as "pets," and it all started with a kind woman who wouldn't give up until she got help for a sick, dying ferret in an Arkansas pet store. The woman repeatedly asked the store manager to let her take the ferret home for rehabilitation, but the manager refused. Finally, she called PETA for help. We pushed animal control to check on the ferret, and the store's owner quickly surrendered the ill animal.
PETA's caseworker explained to the store's owner that animals suffer in mass-breeding facilities and animal dealers' warehouses before they end up in pet stores. The owner agreed to watch PETA's undercover video footage from the now-defunct exotic-animal warehouse U.S. Global Exotics, Inc., and the massive ferret factory Triple F Farms, Inc. He was so moved by the plight of wild-born exotic animals—who are often abducted from their families and stuffed into luggage to be smuggled into the U.S.—that he agreed never to buy or sell these animals again.
This victory is an encouragement to us all always to report cruelty and never to miss an opportunity to educate others about how animals suffer in the pet trade and other cruel industries. You never know whose mind you might change!
Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post
Update: After meeting with PETA and reviewing our evidence, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected Triple F Farms and confirmed our findings of multiple Animal Welfare Act violations. The USDA's inspection report details, among other atrocities, that newborn ferrets fell through gaping wire cage bottoms and that ferrets were denied adequate food, water, and veterinary care and subjected to major surgeries performed by improperly trained lay employees in unsanitary conditions. Triple F is now under federal investigation. Read the full report to learn about the rest of the USDA's findings.
Original Blog posted September 2nd, 2011:
Personnel with the USDA have inspected Triple F Farms, Inc., a massive ferret-breeding factory farm near Sayre, Pennsylvania, based on evidence that PETA recently presented to the agency following a nearly four-month-long undercover investigation that blew the lid off sickening abuse and neglect of thousands of ferrets there. Bradford County District Attorney Dan Barrett’s office reviewed a complaint filed by PETA and has now begun an investigation of Triple F.
PETA found that Triple F's owners, supervisors, and workers left ferrets with bleeding rectal prolapses, gaping wounds, herniated organs, painful mammary gland infections, and ruptured, bleeding eyes to suffer and die without veterinary care. Triple F forbade workers, including PETA's investigator, to rescue thousands of newborn and young ferrets—who had fallen through wire cage bottoms 3 feet to the concrete floor below—from accumulated piles and puddles of waste, where the animals were left to perish.
Day after day, at least 6,000 ferrets were confined to filthy, severely crowded cages in stifling-hot barns, with hundreds denied food and water. PETA's investigator witnessed workers who stepped on ferrets, buried them in feces, and threw them into an incinerator alive. Triple F employees cut organs and anal sacs out of inadequately anesthetized ferrets, who cried out in pain.
The animals who make it out of this hellhole alive face even more misery because Triple F sells ferrets to laboratories around the world for experimentation as well as to pet shops, including Petland. Triple F has had recent contracts worth nearly $2 million with federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Navy.
PETA is calling for appropriate criminal charges. We've also filed complaints with five other federal and state agencies, including one regarding Triple F's routine exposure of live ferrets to ferret carcasses.
Please help these ferrets by asking CDC director Thomas Frieden to investigate Triple F and determine whether the agency wishes to continue to funnel millions of taxpayer dollars into abusive animal mills like Triple F. Check back for more updates as this case unfolds.
After receiving damning reports from someone working inside the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), PETA filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) earlier this year. The USDA found, among other abuses, that sheep who had undergone invasive experimental surgeries (including one sheep who could not stand up afterward) apparently received no pain relief at all, that a goat died in surgery without proper monitoring during anesthesia, and that experimenters using ferrets in an infectious-disease study neglected to consult with veterinary experts. The USDA noted that experimenters failed to provide basic post-operative pain relief to animals who had been subjected to invasive surgeries—including allegedly leaving a dog who had tubes implanted during surgery to die without any treatment. The agency has cited UTMB for violating the minimum standards of the Animal Welfare Act. UTMB has "ongoing" problems with oversight, says the agency.
Please e-mail UTMB President David L. Callender and ask him to immediately discipline experimenters for their cruelty to animals.
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
Lackland Air Force Base in Texas is one of a tiny minority of facilities in the U.S. that still torments animals in outdated, cruel, and ineffective intubation training exercises for nurses and pediatric residents. Even though superior and sophisticated simulators that replicate human anatomy and physiology and that better prepare trainees to intubate children are widely used across the country, Lackland insists on abusing live ferrets instead. Trainees force hard plastic tubes down the ferrets' delicate windpipes as many as six times each session in a procedure that can cause bleeding, swelling, pain, scarring, collapsed lungs, and even death.
PETA, along with several military medical experts, has filed a complaint with the U.S. Army Medical Command and the Air Force surgeon general on the grounds that Lackland's animal intubation laboratory likely violates Joint Services Army Regulation 40-33, which requires that non-animal methods be used for training whenever they are available. More than 90 percent of U.S. pediatric residency programs like Lackland's—including those at other military facilities—use only modern infant simulators for intubation training.
Lackland's training methods show a lack of compassion for animals and provide doctors and nurses with inferior training. You can send a polite e-mail to Lackland's Brig. Gen. Leonard Patrick and ask him to end the use of animals for intubation training —for everyone's benefit.
Written by Michelle Sherrow
Paris has done it again. She's gotten herself another animal. This time she's purchased a pot-bellied pig who will surely be tossed aside faster than last year's "it" bag when the skeevy socialite tires of her.
Pot bellied pigs are inquisitive animals who require a lot of care and attention. Paris has burned through Chihuahuas, ferrets, and kinkajous in the past, so there's no reason to think that an animal who will undoubtedly root through her precious Manolos will grow old by her side as her BFF.
Pot-bellied pigs were all the rage in the 80s, a decade that had some truly unfortunate trends, but Paris seems bent on resurrecting them all. It's one thing for her to rake up fashion violations like this, but it's quite another to make animals suffer. If we could have the ex-con arrested for being so uncaring, we would.
Written by Karin Bennett
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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