Written by Michelle Kretzer
It's fitting that a man who sold dogs to laboratories may end up behind bars himself. A federal court sentenced Floyd Martin to a year in prison after he and his wife, Susan, illegally purchased hundreds of dogs and sold them to laboratories. Susan Martin was convicted of conspiracy and received probation. The couple was fined $300,000. They had pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from selling dogs to be tormented and, in all likelihood, killed.
And the dogs weren't tormented only when they got to the laboratories. A U.S. Department of Agriculture investigation of the Martins' dingy facility, Chestnut Grove Kennel, resulted in citations for violations of animal welfare laws, such as housing incompatible dogs together, leaving dogs with injuries seemingly untreated, having dangerous enclosures, and more. PETA obtained these never-before-released pictures from inside the facility:
It's not illegal for animal dealers like the Martins to buy animals from "bunchers," people who pick animals up off the streets, steal them from backyards, or obtain them from animal shelters or "free to a good home" ads. But federal law limits the Martins and other "random source" dealers—like notorious R&R Research, which PETA exposed not long ago—to purchasing only 24 animals a year from each buncher in order to try to keep illegal acts to a minimum. The Martins purchased hundreds of dogs from just two individuals, then lied on documents to cover it up.
Because of such rampant illegal activity and abuse of animals, PETA and others have long campaigned for lawmakers to shut down random source dealers. And our efforts are paying off: The National Institutes of Health, which funds most experiments on animals in the U.S., won't allow the use of animals from Class B dealers after 2015. And last session, Congress introduced the Pet Safety and Protection Act of 2011, which would prohibit Class B dealers from selling animals to laboratories.
Written by Jeff Mackey
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.
Ashley Bell earned a nomination for "Best Scared-as-S**t Performance" at the MTV Movie Awards for her portrayal of the possessed Nell Sweetzer in The Last Exorcism, produced by our buddy Eli Roth. Now, before The Last Exorcism 2 hits theaters, she's releasing an exclusive video for PETA that's scarier than anything even Eli could come up with.
A longtime animal rights activist and vegetarian, Ashley believes that everyone, even if they are scared, should see the videos of PETA's undercover investigations: "[W]hen you really see pictures and videos of what animals go through on a day-to-day basis, you can't get those images out of your head."
Halloween may be over, but every day is a nightmare for animals on factory farms, in laboratories, and on fur farms. Share Ashley's new video and encourage others to exorcise cruelty.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has ordered the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC) to pay more than $12,000 in fines for its cruel, incompetent—and sometimes fatal—treatment of animals, citing the institution for 10 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA) in its laboratories between 2008 and 2010. Two of the citations in the penalty were the result of a 2008 complaint filed by PETA.
After PETA submitted information about archaic and deadly medical training exercises in which rabbits at UCHC had needles repeatedly stabbed into their chests, the USDA found that the facility didn't properly seek non-invasive alternatives nor did it adequately document how the animals were used. The other violations for which UCHC was cited and fined include rabbit deaths caused by improper anesthesia and poorly trained employees.
UCHC was previously fined $5,500 by the USDA in 2007 for AWA violations, including injecting unapproved substances into a monkey's brain and an incident in which a monkey was dragged so roughly by a metal collar that his eyes bled. That penalty resulted from complaints filed by PETA Associate Director Justin Goodman, who was then a UConn grad student leading a successful campaign to end experiments on primates at the school. Not only were the experiments permanently shut down, but following a PETA complaint, the laboratory was also ordered to return $65,000 in federal funding.
And that's not all: In 2001, UConn's main campus paid $129,000 in USDA fines for 99 violations of animal welfare laws. You'd hope the university would have learned its lesson by now, but as long as animals are suffering in school laboratories, PETA will be working to stop the violence.
Rabbits are frequent victims of animal experimenters because they are mild-tempered and easy to handle, confine, and breed—more than 241,000 of them are abused in U.S. laboratories every year.
Last year, the University of Connecticut's Health Center and main campus received more than $63.5 million from the National Institutes of Health, of which more than 40 percent will be spent on animal experimentation. Please ask the federal government to stop funding cruel and antiquated animal experiments and to put your tax dollars toward modern, humane, and superior research methods.
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
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.
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.
For more than two decades, experimenters at the National Institute on Aging (NIA, part of the National Institutes of Health) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison) starved caged monkeys—depriving them of a whopping 30 percent of needed calories—to see if this would increase their longevity. Now, the vivisectors at NIA have announced that the extreme, prolonged deprivation had no effect on the monkeys' life span.
The NIA studies, funded by taxpayers, started in 1987, and the UW–Madison studies began in 1989. At both facilities—and also at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, where similar experiments are being conducted—the monkeys, in addition to being kept chronically hungry in a semi-starved state, were imprisoned in tiny barren cages and condemned to a lifetime of isolation, without even the simplest benefit of any cage mates. As journalist Gina Kolata described in The New York Times:
For 25 years, the rhesus monkeys were kept semi-starved, lean and hungry. The males' weights were so low they were the equivalent of a 6-foot-tall man who tipped the scales at just 120 to 133 pounds. The hope was that if the monkeys lived longer, healthier lives by eating a lot less, then maybe people, their evolutionary cousins, would, too.
When the studies at UW–Madison were first made public in 2009, PETA filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the university's egregious violations of the Animal Welfare Act. In addition, PETA complained to the UW–Madison Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, but our concerns were dismissed.
Now, after decades of condemning intelligent, sensitive monkeys to protracted suffering, the vivisectors have admitted that their experiments not only failed to make their point but also were poorly designed: The monkeys were fed a diet that was 28.5 percent sucrose (i.e., empty calories). So, in addition to being ethically inexcusable, the experiments were scientifically nonsensical.
But no matter what the experimenters were trying to prove, it was wrong to cage and starve these monkeys. All so-called "calorie-restriction experiments" (that's vivisector lingo for "starving animals") should be banned now. Primates are extremely intelligent animals who form intricate social relationships, experience the same wide range of emotions that we do, and exhibit a capacity for suffering similar to ours. Rhesus macaque monkeys have been shown to use tools, count, and communicate complex information. Monkeys can also express empathy, and they possess a sense of fairness—something that many experimenters seem to lack.
Ssppeeeeddyy|cc by 2.0
We each have a role to play in helping monkeys and other primates suffering in laboratories. Please urge the federal government to stop wasting our tax dollars on cruel and pointless experiments on animals.
In response to a series of significant animal welfare violations and complaints filed by PETA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken the rare step of fining the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) almost $12,000 for repeated violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act. ONPRC imprisons, sickens, terrorizes, and mutilates thousands of monkeys each year in experiments with impunity, so it's good to know that the facility will be punished for causing animals to suffer more by failing to uphold even minimum standards.
The violations, which took place in 2009, included the escape of nine monkeys from the facility as well as the deaths of five other monkeys from a variety of causes, including from dehydration, being injected with unapproved compounds, and improper procedures performed by an inadequately trained employee. Following the escape, PETA called on the USDA to investigate and issue a fine to ONPRC.
In 2007, PETA conducted a shocking undercover investigation, which exposed horrific laboratory conditions at ONPRC. The next year, the USDA issued an "official warning"—the precursor to a fine—to ONPRC. Internal documents obtained by PETA had revealed that a sick pregnant monkey died after being denied veterinary care, that a surgical sponge was left in a baboon—causing an abscess—and was discovered only after he was killed for an experiment, and that experimenters mistakenly performed surgery on the wrong monkey. After repeatedly finding negligence and callous disregard, federal investigators are finally speaking the only language that ONPRC understands: dollars and cents.
Take a stand for the animals imprisoned at ONPRC. Ask the National Institutes of Health to stop funding cruel and useless nicotine experiments on animals at ONPRC and elsewhere.
Following a vigorous PETA campaign, Air China has confirmed that it's joining nearly every other airline worldwide by refusing to transport monkeys to laboratories. The airline's decision comes less than 24 hours after PETA asked its Facebook and Twitter followers to call Air China Cargo's main office at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and demand that the airline stop shipping primates to laboratories—a move that prompted thousands of phone calls to the company.
Percita|cc by 2.0
PETA's work to bring about this policy change dates back to last year and has included pleas to company officials, complaints to the government, phone and email protests and a demonstration at Air China's office at Los Angeles International Airport. Last month, PETA filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) after a laboratory-bound monkey escaped aboard an Air China flight. The USDA cited the airline, China's largest and their flagship carrier, for violating federal animal welfare laws and warned that subsequent violations could result in civil penalties or criminal prosecution for Air China.
This victory is also due to the thousands of members and supporters who responded to PETA's action alert—resulting in at least 24,000 e-mails to Air China's offices around the world—and to everyone who flooded Air China's offices at JFK airport with calls asking the airline to stop shipping monkeys to laboratories.
China is the source of more than 70 percent of monkeys imported to the U.S. for use in cruel experiments—and with Air China no longer participating in this bloody trade, experimenters will find it harder to get their hands on more victims.
There's still more work to be done! Please take a minute now to urge the tiny handful of airlines that still transport monkeys to laboratories to join Air China and its peers in adopting a policy against transporting primates destined for experiments.
Just six months after PETA announced that it had purchased stock in BIOQUAL—the company formerly known as "SEMA"—to urge it to phase out the use of chimpanzees in experiments, the Washington Post reports that the company is doing just that.
BIOQUAL's announcement comes 25 years after Jane Goodall called for the closure of SEMA after undercover video footage released by PETA revealed abysmal conditions in the lab. Baby chimpanzees were locked inside tiny steel boxes in complete isolation and exhibited signs of insanity, rocking incessantly in their dark cages. The misery of the SEMA chimpanzees is documented in PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk's landmark book Free the Animals.
Until this development, little but its name seemed to have changed at BIOQUAL. PETA recently used the Freedom of Information Act to secure descriptions of BIOQUAL's experiments on chimpanzees. We learned that in one experiment, six infant chimpanzees—some as young as 9 months of age—were taken from their mothers, caged individually, exposed to a virus, and subjected to months of painful liver, bone marrow, lymph node, and intestinal biopsies. This April, we pointed out in official comments submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that these and other experiments on chimpanzees at BIOQUAL were considered unnecessary by the Institute of Medicine in its landmark report on the scientific validity of experiments on chimpanzees, and we called on the NIH to discontinue its funding.
Chimpanzees are our closest relatives, with psychological and physical needs that are strikingly similar to our own. They are intelligent, have unique personalities, and are capable of experiencing profound suffering. However, this has not saved them from being imprisoned, stripped of their autonomy, and used in invasive and sometimes painful experiments. The U.S. is the only developed country that continues to use chimpanzees in invasive experiments, but the pending Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees and retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees.
Please tell your congressional representatives that all chimpanzees in U.S. laboratories should be sent to reputable sanctuaries and allowed to live out their remaining years in peace.
In response to a complaint filed by PETA in May, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has cited Air China for violating federal animal welfare laws. PETA's filing stemmed from an incident in which a monkey being shipped to a laboratory escaped from his cage during an Air China passenger flight at New York's JFK International Airport. The monkey was part of a shipment of more than 100 macaques, crammed four to a crate, who were headed to notorious South Carolina–based laboratory supplier and experimentation facility Alpha Genesis, which itself has been cited for 14 violations of federal animal welfare laws over the last two years, including violations for socially isolating monkeys and confining them to tiny barren cages.
Air China was cited not only for transporting the monkey in an unsecured enclosure but also for handling monkeys in a way that might cause them harm—the tread mark of a shoe was found on the damaged crate, indicating that someone may have kicked or stepped on it. Air China was also cited one month prior when a laboratory-bound monkey sustained injuries after being transported in an enclosure with dangerously sharp edges.
Please join PETA in calling for Air China to join nearly every major domestic and international airline—including American, Delta, China Southern, Hainan, Lufthansa, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, El Al, and dozens of others—in refusing to transport primates to laboratories, where they are caged, tormented in painful experiments, and then killed.
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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