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.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop—'Til the Truth Comes Out

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:

• A sheep identified only as "572M" was subjected to third-degree burns over 20 percent of her body and was forced to inhale smoke in experiments conducted by Daniel Traber. The following day, the burn lesions were cut off, and skin was grafted over the wounds. There was no indication of post-operative pain relief in any of 572M's records—a failure that was confirmed in the USDA's inspection report. Eighteen days after she was burned, 572M was killed.
• A 4-year-old marmoset monkey identified as "#28046" was subjected to viral and bacterial infections of his central nervous system in experiments conducted by Mark Estes. Monkeys used in the experiments endured bloody nasal discharge, anorexia, lethargy, ruffled coats, and ocular discharge before being killed. #28046 was described as being "very thin" and "dehydrated" and as "nonresponsive in rest box … hunched … hypothermic … thin/emaciated." Ten days after #28046's condition was noted, the monkey was found dead in his cage.

How You Can Help Animals in UTMB Laboratories

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 e-mail UTMB President David L. Callender and ask him to discipline experimenters for their cruelty to animals immediately.

The U.S. Army's plans to use animals in trauma training are enough to make a goat faint. The army is in the market to buy up to 3,600 goats to torment and kill in exercises like those seen in this shocking undercover video, which PETA released last month. The video, sent to us by a brave whistleblower, shows instructors as they saw off live goats' limbs with tree trimmers and crudely cut open the animals' abdomens and yank out their organs. Goats moan loudly and kick during the procedures.

Goats are intelligent, inquisitive, social animals who can quickly learn to open latches on farm gates and let themselves out. Moms and kids share a strong bond and have been known to recognize each other even if they have been separated for years.

The Army plans to mutilate thousands of goats even though high-tech human simulators are readily available and offer soldiers superior training in how to treat wounds in the field.

You can help: Send PETA's two goat images included here to the Army and urge it to save thousands of goats from suffering and dying in cruel trauma training exercises by using modern simulators instead. The Army is accepting bids only until June 11, so please act now!

PETA has been on pharmaceutical company Amgen's case for years over the company's stubborn refusal to more actively implement alternatives to animal experiments, among other things. But we're riding high this week after pulling a fast one at Amgen's Tour of California Bike Race.

Amgen sponsored the massive race and had its branding everywhere, but so did we:

PETA got the last laugh near the finish line. As the racers flew by and the news cameras flashed, two stealthily placed staffers whipped out signs about Amgen's animal abuse and held them high for the crowd to see:

It's time for Amgen to join in the race to replace animal tests with modern science.

Just three years after it opened following a long battle with PETA and local citizens, a laboratory owned by a notorious animal testing company, Covance, in Chandler, Arizona, is closing because of lack of demand for its cruel and deadly services.  

Shutting Down Cruelty …

When plans to build the Chandler facility were uncovered in 2005, PETA worked with outraged local residents to try to stop it and managed to delay its construction. The world's largest contract testing laboratory, Covance subjects animals to painful and deadly tests of cosmetics ingredients, personal and household products, food additives, industrial chemicals, and drugs. Covance is also the world's largest breeder of dogs and the largest U.S. importer of primates to be tormented and killed in experiments.

Despite media censorship, word clearly got around about the horrendous cruelty found inside Covance's laboratories, including physical and psychological abuse of primates and lack of veterinary care for sick and injured animals.  

The shutdown of the Arizona facility follows the 2010 closure of a Covance lab in Virginia, where shocking abuse of animals was exposed by a PETA undercover investigation. Around that same time, Covance scrapped plans to build a massive facility elsewhere in Virginia that PETA had urged officials to reject.

… But Keeping Up the Pressure

These closures will save countless monkeys, dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, and other animals from suffering, but Covance is still in business, so PETA's work goes on, including a recent protest at the company's annual meeting, where PETA also presented a resolution calling on the company to make animal welfare improvements.

Ready to help animals in laboratories? Learn how—and be sure to follow PETA on Twitter to learn about more opportunities to get active.

PETA protesters wearing monkey masks and holding signs reading, "Deplane Monkeys," recently held demonstrations outside the Chicago headquarters of United Airlines and the U.S. headquarters of Air France in New York. PETA is urging the airlines to commit to a ban on shipping primates to laboratories, as almost every airline in the world already has, including Delta, American, US Air, and China Airlines.

No-Fly Zone

PETA demonstrators also dropped a banner from a busy overpass next to United HQ, generating a lot of views and picture-taking:

United Airlines, which recently acquired Continental Airlines, is now the last U.S. air carrier without a policy prohibiting the transportation of primates to be abused and killed in crude, painful, and archaic experiments in laboratories.

Think Flying Coach Is Tough?

The cruelty involved in laboratory experiments on primates and other animals should be self-evident: After hearing from PETA about the horrors that cats and dogs endure in labs, for instance, Nippon Cargo Airlines, which had been shipping dogs and cats from the United States to Japanese labs, implemented a worldwide policy against shipping any animals to labs.

When primates are shipped to laboratories, they're first separated from their families and locked inside dark, terrifying cargo holds for as long as 30 hours. Then they're delivered to facilities that will poison them, cut them up, and kill them. Many monkeys who are shipped to laboratories were first ripped from their homes in the wild.

Help Stop Primates From Being Shipped to Laboratories

Please join PETA in telling airlines that still transport monkeys to U.S. laboratories to adopt a policy against the transportation of nonhuman primates for use in experiments.

Here is some of the hideous handiwork of April's Vivisector of the Month, Janet Neisewander of Arizona State University, who has been conducting wasteful and cruel addiction experiments on animals since 1984.

Using nearly $3 million in taxpayer money, Neisewander gets rats hooked on drugs like morphine, cocaine, and nicotine—sometimes after obliterating parts of the rats' brains with acid.

In these pictures, the rats have nicotine pumped directly into their jugular veins through tubes implanted in their heads. Later, they'll be killed and decapitated and have their brains removed.

How You Can Help Animals Killed in Nicotine Experiments

Thanks to studies in humans, we already know that smoking cigarettes can cause disease in nearly every organ of the human body. Please tell the National Institutes of Health to stop funding nicotine experiments on animals and use tax money for prevention, education, and human-based research instead.

Navy veteran Bob Barker was appalled at what he saw in undercover video footage of U.S. Coast Guard trauma training leaked to PETA. In the video, live goats are stabbed, have their internal organs pulled out, and have their limbs cut off with tree trimmers. The goats moan loudly and kick while they are being mutilated, a sign that they were not sufficiently anesthetized, while an instructor cheerfully whistles and a soldier jokes about writing songs about mutilating the animals.

As a proud vet, Bob wants members of the armed forces to have the best possible training—and that means replacing archaic and cruel animal exercises  with superior lifelike human simulators that can bleed, breathe, have their bones broken, and even "die." The simulators are already in use at many military facilities, and military regulations even require that non-animal methods be used when available. But the policy isn't being enforced.

Bob wrote to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on PETA's behalf to urge them to improve military trauma training by mandating that all programs use only advanced human simulators.

What You Can Do

Join Bob in asking Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security officials to comply with federal regulations and replace all use of animals with human simulators.

In advance of the April 24 U.S. Senate hearing on the historic Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act (GAPCSA), PETA sent members of Congress a print of a painting along with a photo of and a letter about the artist—a chimpanzee named Jamie, who was rescued from a laboratory.

Photo: Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest

From Experiments to Expressionism

Jamie, now 34 years old, spent more than 20 years alone in a cage in the windowless basement of a Pennsylvania laboratory, where she was used in hepatitis experiments. In 2008, she—along with six other chimpanzees from the same laboratory—was rescued with PETA's help by Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest. Jamie now spends her days relaxing, playing outdoors with her friends, and expressing herself through art, including pen drawings and finger paintings. You can watch her creativity in action here.

GAPCSA would ban invasive experiments on chimpanzees, retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, and save taxpayers millions of dollars a year. PETA hopes Jamie's artwork and photo will help legislators put a face to this lifesaving bill at a critical moment.

How You Can Help Great Apes Like Jamie

Please contact your U.S. representative and senators and urge them to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act.

Thanks to a brave whistleblower, PETA has obtained horrific undercover video of live animals whose limbs were cut off for an archaic military training drill. The course was held earlier this year in Virginia Beach, Virginia, by private contractor Tier 1 Group. 

In the shocking video, instructors repeatedly crack and cut off the limbs of live goats with tree trimmers, stab the animals with scalpels to cause internal injuries, and cut into their abdomens to crudely pull out their organs. Some of the goats moan loudly and kick their legs during the mutilations, which veterinarians who viewed the video say are signs that the goats were not adequately anesthetized and may have even been feeling pain.

The disturbing video footage shows a callous course instructor who cheerfully whistles while dismembering goats as well as members of the Coast Guard who joke about writing a song about mutilating the animals.

According to the whistleblower, later in the day the goats were shot in the face with pistols and were hacked apart with an ax while still alive. 

Today, there are high-tech humanlike simulators available specifically for military training that can breathe, bleed, cry, talk, and respond to medications. These human-based methods are obviously more humane and effective than cutting apart, blowing up, shooting, and killing thousands of animals every year. One shockingly realistic simulator is a special suit designed to be worn by a human actor that enables military personnel to safely perform emergency surgical procedures on a live human without any injury to the person.

Last year, PETA helped end an Army course that involved poisoning monkeys with chemicals, and we've saved ferrets and cats from other cruel military training courses by convincing military officials to switch to modern simulators. 

The evidence of the superiority of these state-of-the-art simulation methods is so overwhelming that Congress has introduced legislation to phase out the use of animals in military training in favor of non-animal methods.

We Need All Hands on Deck

Military medical experts, veterans, and civilian physicians are joining PETA in urging U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and other military officials to immediately end the use of animals in military trauma training exercises. And we need your help, too! 

In light of Merck's record of failing to provide even the most minimal care to animals used in its experiments, PETA has filed a lawsuit against the pharmaceutical giant for violating PETA's shareholder rights and refusing to include a proposal by PETA—a Merck stockholder—among the 2012 proxy materials that are being considered at the company's upcoming annual meeting. PETA is asking the court to order Merck to include the proposal and give shareholders the chance to cast an informed vote on it.

What Is Merck Trying to Hide?

PETA's proposal simply requests an annual report on Merck's "procedures to ensure proper animal care, including measures to improve the living conditions of all animals used in-house and at contract laboratories"—but the drugmaker has refused, apparently preferring to conceal from shareholders how Merck and its contractors have repeatedly violated federal animal welfare laws. Since 2008 alone, Merck's violations have included caging primates in isolation, inadequate anesthesia procedures and housing of animals, and lack of veterinary care and personnel training, just to name a few.

Merck's record is especially disturbing since, in the last three years alone, it has used tens of thousands of primates, dogs, rabbits, hamsters, and guinea pigs in experiments—including more than 16,000 animals in painful tests, thousands of whom were given no pain relief whatsoever. Shareholders have a right to know what the company is doing to prevent further violations of animal welfare laws, don't you think?