Hip cosmetics company Urban Decay has earned PETA's Courage in Commerce Award for putting animals ahead of market share and reversing its decision to sell in China, where animals are harmed and killed in product tests. The company's decision followed talks with PETA and thousands of e-mails from disappointed consumers. While many companies have shed their cruelty-free policies as easily as last year's fashion for a share of the profits from China, Urban Decay officials have decided that the cost was too high. They're corporate champs in our book, and the company is going back on PETA's cruelty-free list. 

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Change is afoot in China, too. PETA is financially supporting scientists from the Institute for In Vitro Sciences, who are working with the Chinese government to replace cruel and archaic animal tests with superior non-animal methods, and already, we are seeing huge progress. Until the day when product tests on animals are a thing of the past, we hope other companies eyeing the Chinese and other markets where cruel tests are required will follow Urban Decay's example and put ethics first.

We've told you before how cats and ferrets suffer in archaic training courses at Washington University in St. Louis. Now, we've obtained a photo of the miserable living conditions for a monkey named George, who is also confined to this facility:

Information on who is experimenting on George was not released, but we wonder if it might have been Dora Angelaki, who has been crowned Vivisector of the Month for the month of June. Angelaki, who recently left Washington University to become chair of the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, drills screws into monkeys' skulls and implants a "head ring," which attaches to an apparatus to control the animals' heads. She also implants coils into their eyes and electrodes into their ears before strapping the monkeys to a chair designed to immobilize their bodies as they are spun and shaken so that Angelaki can observe their ability to track a target. In some cases, she damages parts of the monkeys' brains first. Angelaki has received more than $18 million in federal tax money for her primate experiments.

How You Can Help Animals in Laboratories

While Angelaki has left Washington University, there are still animals there who need your help. Please urge the school to end the use of animals in cruel and archaic intubation training exercises and replace them with modern, effective teaching methods.