Written by PETA
It was literally a sticky situation for employees at one Lowe's store in Toledo, Ohio, yesterday, when a woman dressed as a mouse entered the store and "glued" herself to the floor. As the "mouse" screamed and writhed, customers surrounded her with caution signs reading, "Lowe's Tortures Animals."
The "mouse" was taken into police custody after half an hour of shrieking and struggling, and she was lucky. Being arrested is nothing compared to the days of starvation and dehydration that animals ensnared in glue traps suffer. The misery of glue traps is so painful that some animals even chew off their own legs in a desperate attempt to free themselves. No glue trap is humane—and there are effective alternatives. Urge Lowe's to end the torment and stop selling glue traps immediately.
Written by Logan Scherer
On Sunday, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times ran a great article about a recent undercover investigation conducted at a Hampshire laboratory that tests Dysport—a wrinkle-erasing drug similar to Botox—on mice. The investigation was conducted by our friends at the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and among the most disturbing findings of the investigation was the fact that technicians repeatedly broke the backs of mice while attempting to kill them with ball-point pens. Yes, you read that right. Staffers then used the same ball-point pens to fill out their victims' death records.
Laboratory workers were also videotaped botching injections and swearing at rabbits. One staffer calls a struggling rabbit "a little s**t" and "a disgrace."
As with Botox, both in the U.S. and the U.K., each batch of Dysport is tested on animals. More than 41,000 mice were killed in Dysport tests in a six-month period at just this one laboratory.
Horrors like these don't just take place across the pond either. In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that more than 100 million mice and rats are killed in experiments every year. And here in the U.S. these sensitive, intelligent animals are not protected by any federal laws, even though they are the animals who suffer most frequently at the hands of animal experimenters. Investigation after investigation shows that these highly social animals are handled like they are disposable laboratory equipment instead of living animals who deserve respect and kindness.
Written by Alisa Mullins
It's true: Dollar General cares—about its customers' concerns and about animals.
After we received complaints that Dollar General, which has thousands of stores across the U.S., was selling hideously cruel glue traps, we wrote to the bargain retailer. In our letter, we described how animals who get stuck on glue traps can suffer for days before finally dying of starvation or dehydration. Many victims of glue traps rip their skin from their own faces and bodies as they try to escape, and some resort to chewing off their own limbs while trying to free themselves. We also let the company know that there are plenty of humane ways to deal with mice and rats.
Dollar General responded to our letter by announcing that it will stop selling glue traps. Just like that. The company didn't hem and haw—officials simply made a compassionate decision.
Dollar General joins other large retailers, including Albertsons, Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, and Safeway, that have stopped selling glue traps after discussions with PETA. Please thank the company for its decision—and then ask home-improvement biggie baddie Lowe's to follow suit.
Written by Karin Bennett
In a news item that dates back to late August but was just reported on in Sunday's Boston Herald, a half dozen staff and students at Harvard Medical School became ill after they drank coffee from a vending machine that had been laced with sodium azide, a preservative that is commonly used in laboratories. The story reported that all the afflicted worked in a laboratory where they torment mice in immune system experiments.
While we would never wish poisoning upon any living being (talk about a painful way to go) it does have us wondering if karma might be at work again.
Recent publications from Harvard Medical School faculty members included experiments in which mice had 25 percent of their skin burned off by placing them in 190-plus-degree water and were then injected with increasingly large doses of E. coli to see at which point 50 percent of the animals would die. In another experiment, mice were injected with cancerous cells to induce the growth of colorectal tumors and then injected with a herpes virus to see how it affected the cancer. At the end of the experiment, the animals who didn't die during the study were killed and dissected.
It does look like some of the animal torturers experimenters at Harvard have gotten a taste of their own medicine—literally. Let this be a lesson to you, Harvard: Never underestimate the fury of a mouse scorned.
Last year, PETA filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Motomco, the glue trap manufacturer that supplies Lowe's with its sticky death traps. Our complaint stated that Motomco was selling misleadingly labeled glue traps designed to make people believe that these traps were somehow acceptable. The label stated that the glue trap contained a naturally occurring anesthetic called eugenol, implying that animals caught in the trap did not suffer or feel pain. In reality, they do suffer and feel extreme pain.
We recently received a letter from the FTC letting us know that our complaint has officially been closed—because Motomco has removed the misleading claim about eugenol from its packaging and promotion materials!
Since Motomco's glue traps are the only brand that Lowe's sells—and Lowe's claims that it only sells glue traps that are "humane" because of eugenol—we hope that the change in Motomco's packaging will be the final push that Lowe's needs to pull glue traps from its shelves. Because it can no longer hide behind Motomco's misrepresentations, we've written to the home improvement company asking it to immediately rid its stores of the cruelest mouse traps on the market today.
Humane alternatives do exist and it's time for Lowe's to join other retailers, including Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Safeway, Dollar Tree, and Albertsons, in banning the sale of glue traps. Click here to find out how you can help.
Since Michael Jackson's passing on Thursday, there have been hundreds of news stories ranging from how he influenced just about every musician performing today to how he's responsible for the Academy's recent decision to allow 10 nominations for “Best Picture” (no, really!). It got us thinking: What if Michael's music could be used to help animals?
We've written to Michael Jackson's estate asking for the rights to the singer's first solo hit, "Ben," which was written for the 1972 film of the same name. This beautiful song is about the friendship between a lonely boy and a rat named Ben, and we're hoping to use it to raise awareness about the plight of rats and other animals tormented in laboratory experiments.
Mice and rats make up the vast majority of animals used in experiments, but because they are excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act, they are denied even minimal legal protection. Part of the message of "Ben" is that rats are frequently misunderstood. (For example—did you know that rats and mice are fastidiously clean, intelligent, and highly sociable animals—they even giggle!) In the song, Jackson sings:
Ben, most people would turn you away I don't listen to a word they say They don't see you as I do I wish they would try to.
We hope we'll be able to use this song to inspire people to understand rats a little better and to join our campaign to stop cruel and archaic animal experiments on them.
Written by Amanda Schinke
That's the number of glue traps—123—that have now been removed from the shelves of Gelson's Supermarkets in Southern California thanks to PETA member Renee Papadapolous.
Renee's letter to Gelson's—in which she described how mice and other animals suffer hemorrhaging, shock, and other horrors when stuck in "pans of pain"—earned a speedy reply from the chain. She admits, "I was actually surprised at the quick, positive, and friendly response …."
Friendly indeed! Gelson's immediately assured Renee that it would stop selling glue traps as soon as its current stock ran out. Thankful that Gelson's was taking such swift action, Renee still thought that something more could be done, so she offered to buy the chain's remaining stock of 123 glue traps. The entire stock was shipped to her, and she destroyed them.
Renee's refusal to rest until rodents were spared has earned her our "Compassionate Action Award"—it's also a reminder that one person really can make a difference for animals by taking action. Now are you ready? One … two … three … go!
All this week, Slate has been running a five-part series on animal experiments. The series starts out by telling the story of a dog named Pepper who was stolen in 1965 and who "changed American science." As the author, Daniel Engber, points out, the fall-out from Pepper's story led to the 1966 passage of the Animal Welfare Act—the first federal law protecting animals in laboratories.
In today's installment, Engber describes the time he spent as a grad student working on a macaque named Clayton in a university laboratory. He describes how he returned to the lab years later to find that, while his life has moved on—and out of the laboratory—Clayton is still imprisoned, his whole world limited to just two rooms:
In all the time I'd been gone, Clayton had lived in the same room, on the same feeding schedule, and with many of the same neighbors. … Every day or two, he's carted off to a room painted all in black, and his head is fixed in place by the post that still protrudes from his skull. He sits there as always, staring at targets on a computer screen. When he moves his eyes the way he's supposed to, he gets a droplet of Tang as a reward.
Engber also talks about PETA's famous Silver Spring monkeys case, which was the impetus behind sweeping changes made to the Animal Welfare Act in 1985, including the creation of oversight committees that we are currently hounding to do their jobs.
While the series of articles focuses on the use of dogs in experiments, it also describes what is done to rats and mice. That's because no discussion of vivisection can rightly avoid the elephant (or, in this case, mouse) in the room—which is the fact that most of the whopping number of animals used in experiments are these small mammals, who, for no reason other than prejudice and convenience, are still specifically excluded from the Animal Welfare Act.
We strongly recommend taking a minute or two to check out the series—and don't miss part IV, which talks about PETA's undercover investigation at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
Yep, rats and mice are finally having their day. Saturday's Wall Street Journal (the second-largest paper in the country and the most respected) features a front-page article about the work of PETA and others to gain protection for rats and mice in laboratories.
Shockingly, even though rats and mice comprise more than 95 percent of the animals used in experiments, they are specifically excluded from the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), the only federal law that protects animals in laboratories. According to the U.S. government, in its infinite wisdom, rats and mice (as well as birds and "cold-blooded" animals) are not "animals." (It's nonsensical, we know.)
That's why PETA has been doing end-runs around the worthless AWA by going straight to the companies that are required to test their products and pointing out the benefits of using effective and humane alternatives. We also monitor the various government agencies' testing programs and object every time we learn about a proposed test on animals that is redundant or for which non-animal alternatives are available. By doing this, we have been able to get dozens of tests on animals stopped (or the number of animals used greatly reduced), which has saved tens of thousands of animals' lives.
We think it's about time that our elected officials thought about rats and mice, don't you? Send a message to your members of Congress demanding that rats and mice be treated like the sensitive animals (not vegetables or minerals) they are.
When you have an epic battle as big as PETA's campaign to convince home improvement behemoth Lowe's to stop selling glue traps, you have to decide if you are "a man or a mouse," as the saying goes. Personally, I'm a mouse. I'm PETA's original "sexy mouse," in fact. Yes, that's me, writhing in a giant "glue trap" outside Lowe's annual meeting last year.
As a proud sexy-mouse veteran, I'm pleased to unveil the newest addition to our Lowe's campaign:
But don't worry! Our classic "sexy mice" are still hitting the streets to let shoppers know that animals stuck in glue traps can suffer for days before succumbing to starvation, dehydration, or suffocation.
Leave a comment and let us know which demonstration you like the most: the traditional sexy mouse, "Mickey" and "Minnie Mouse," or our giant rat and anti-Lowe's minivan. I think you can guess which one is my favorite.
Written by Liz Graffeo
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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