break-fresh-ground / CC

 
Blasting as many as 30 monkeys with radiation and then imprisoning them for the rest of their lives in tiny steel cages in order to assess how the radiation damages their bodies is wrong on too many levels to count. And it also appears to violate NASA's own guidelines—and federal regulations too.

According to new information obtained by PETA through the Freedom of Information Act, NASA appears to have violated its own grant guidelines and the Code of Federal Regulations by approving the outlay of nearly $2 million in taxpayer money on this cruel and wasteful experiment before they had even been evaluated for scientific validity by one of the facilities where they would be taking place and even though the lead experimenter had missed crucial deadlines for receiving approval for the project.

NASA's guidelines state that grant applications that don't meet the relevant requirements will be "declared noncompliant and declined without review," so PETA has filed a complaint with NASA calling for an immediate investigation and asking for the misguided project to be disqualified from receiving even one penny of our tax dollars.

Join us in stopping this abuse of monkeys before it happens by urging Congress to end the barbaric plan.

Written by Logan Scherer

PETA’s regulatory testing division recently fired off a letter to Samuel H. Wilson, acting director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), urging him to cancel planned experiments on mice involving artificial butter flavoring and its ingredients. Yes, I said artificial butter flavoring, the stuff in microwave popcorn.

One ingredient in artificial butter flavoring, diacetyl, is suspected of causing a debilitating—and sometimes deadly—lung disease in dozens of workers and now possibly in consumers as well, and the NIEHS’ knee-jerk reaction is simply to do more animal tests. Keep in mind that producers accounting for 80 percent of the market for this product have already stopped using diacetyl or announced plans to do so, and as our regulatory testing watchdogs pointed out, in experiments that have already been conducted, mice who were forced to inhale diacetyl didn’t develop the same symptoms of obliterative bronchiolitis (OB) that humans did. It sounds like the NIEHS has never heard Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote that goes something like this, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for different results.”

In response to PETA's warnings—which were originally submitted to the NIEHS' National Toxicology Program (NTP) in May—one scientist acknowledged that although "it's not clear how one would extrapolate findings from the animal studies to humans. … [T]hat does not lessen my enthusiasm for this study." In our newest letter, we point out that while the NTP conducts cruel experiments on mice, workers—and possibly consumers—will remain at risk for OB. How about we cut to the chase and instead of conducting irrelevant animal experiments and further delaying the protection of workers and consumers who are exposed to diacetyl, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration immediately rescind its "generally recognized as safe" designation for the chemical?

Jessica Sandler, PETA’s director of regulatory testing said it best,

I’ll keep you posted as this case develops, and in the meantime, here’s a great page about PETA’s behind-the-scenes battle to stop animal testing.

PETA Files reader Dave Cortright passed this hilarious Onion video on to me and I just had to share.

The sad thing is that animal experiments just as absurd as this fictional one still take place. Take smoking/nicotine experiments, for example. We know that smoking is harmful to human health; we don’t need to shove animals into inhalation chambers or dose pregnant rats with huge amounts of nicotine to confirm it. There are countless examples like this, but this was supposed to be a lighthearted entry, so I’ll stop now . . .

Anyway, if you haven’t seen Testing 1, 2, 3 yet, give it a look and let me know what you think.

I got a real kick out of this Bizarro comic someone scanned from their newspaper and sent in the other day, and the wonderful Dan Piraro, the longtime PETA supporter and animal rights advocate who writes the strip, was gracious enough to send me a high-quality version to put on the blog. Thanks, Dan!