Written by PETA
You're out for a walk with your dog when two men suddenly appear and grab him before you have a chance to react. In an instant, your canine companion is gone. Then—as if that weren't horrifying enough—you later learn that your beloved friend is caged in a medical school laboratory, slated to be cut open and killed in a training exercise.
It's every animal guardian's worst nightmare, and it allegedly happened recently to Carmen Valverde of Lima, Peru, and her dog, Tomas.
After Tomas was stolen, a neighbor of Carmen's who works at the teaching hospital in the University of San Marcos recognized him while looking in the surgery room in which the school routinely dissects dogs.
The neighbor alerted Carmen and, wearing a lab coat, Carmen was able to sneak into the facility at the university and rescue Tomas, who was already sedated and strapped down for dissection.
While the school claims that it only dissects "dogs [who] don't have owners," after Tomas' story was made public, at least one other guardian found her missing dog in the same laboratory.
We're following this case and will keep you posted on any developments.
This problem isn't limited to Peru. Animals suffer in laboratories no matter where they come from, but laboratories that are willing to pay for animals provide an incentive for unscrupulous people to get animals wherever they can—often from our streets and yards. "Bunchers" may drug animals, pose as animal control officers, or answer "free to a good home" ads to get puppies and kittens to sell.
You can help end this nightmare by doing the following:
Written by Jeff Mackey
Our terrific colleagues at Japan Anti-Vivisection Association (JAVA), who often work with PETA Asia Pacific, recently alerted us to Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido's continued reliance on cruel animal tests for its products, which include wrinkle creams and its ironically named ZEN Eau de Parfum. Despite the fact that hundreds of companies worldwide have banned all animal tests forever, Shiseido is still forcing chemicals into animals' stomachs and dripping shampoo into their eyes.
No animal should have to die for lipstick, moisturizer, shampoo, or perfume, so we're helping JAVA step up its efforts to get Shiseido and other Japanese companies to give animal testing the heave-ho. Since Shiseido products are sold around the world, you can help convince the company to choose kindness—just go here to tell Shiseido why you won't be buying into its cruelty.
A few days ago, I wrote about how animal testing in the U.K. is on the rise. It struck a chord with a lot of PETA Files readers, who were outraged that animals continue to be killed in cruel experiments, despite the availability of more effective, non-animal methods. The very first person to comment on the blog was Carla*, who said:
Yes, most chemicals put into a living, breathing body will kill you or leave you very, very ill. I'm sick and tired of hearing about these toxicity tests—sooo yesterday—and they continue to reap in funds so they can continue to torture and [maim] their victims. Cosmetics too—it's all BS!! [Vivisectionists] are just plain sadistic beings without a soul!!
The rest of you echoed her response.
Because this is an issue that resonates with so many people, I thought you might enjoy reading this article in the U.K.'s Guardian, written by human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. Tatchell attacks the recent Home Office report head-on and calls on the U.K. government to work diligently to rid the nation of crude animal experiments. The entire article is available after the jump.
Written by Shawna Flavell
We just received word from our friends at PETA Europe that the U.K.'s Home Office—it's like our Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Agency, and U.S. Department of Agriculture all rolled into one—has published its 2008 statistics on animal experiments. Sadly, the information in the report is less than encouraging. More than 3.5 million animals were abused and killed in 3.7 million experiments this past year: That's an increase from last year of 15 percent in individual animals and an increase of 14 percent in procedures. This is the highest number of animals used for experiments in the U.K. since the 1980s and the biggest proportionate rise in numbers since the Home Office began keeping records in the 1940s.
To make it all the more frustrating, only 70 percent of toxicity tests—the ones in which animals are deliberately poisoned to test chemicals—were required by law, meaning that nearly 30 percent of these archaic and needless tests could have been abandoned entirely.
While the number of European tests are rocketing up, the numbers of new medical treatments are going down—not to mention that 90 percent of drugs that pass animal trials fail in humans. All of this from a nation that is leaps and bounds ahead of the U.S. in approving non-animal testing methods for lab studies.
These numbers show us just how vital it is for compassionate people to take action. If we don't speak up, the suffering of animals will continue to be ignored.
Here's your first look at PETA's newest campaign: "Animal Testing Breaks Hearts."
We first launched "Animal Testing Breaks Hearts" as a youth-oriented peta2 campaign, but the reaction from everyone, regardless of age, was "Awww!"
So below are pictures of our first "Big PETA" "Animal Testing Breaks Hearts" campaign event. We promise more to come. So who knows? You just might be greeted by our giant, loveable rat on your next trip to the pharmacy. He's traversing the U.S. and letting everyone who crosses his path know that reducing animal suffering is as easy as refusing to buy products from companies that test on animals.
So next time you head to the store to stock up on cosmetics and household products, arm yourself with PETA's free shopping guide and don't go breakin' any hearts.
Written by Liz Graffeo
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
PETA is always determined and serious in our efforts to raise awareness about—and to stop—animal suffering. Sometimes, our methods are loud, boisterous, and even a little silly, but they are never naïve. That said, we admit that we're floored by the discrepancy in media coverage surrounding two recent events.
After President Obama killed a fly with one swat, media all over the world swarmed PETA for a response. But when landmark cruelty convictions against pig abusers were issued as a result of our undercover investigation, there was barely a buzz.
We know that countless people turn away from upsetting details about how pigs are beaten and sexually abused by pig farmers, raccoons and foxes gnaw their paws off to escape steel-jaw traps set by furriers, and immobilized rabbits writhe when wrinkle creams are smeared into their eyes. And so do many media outlets, lest they anger advertisers and lose money.
So, headlines everywhere mock PETA for suggesting that people consider employing kind methods of dealing with tiny unwanted visitors. Meanwhile, the pigs get zilch. Please help us change that by writing letters to editors to draw attention to this historic victory against animal abusers and spreading the word to your friends and family.
Written by Karin Bennett
Late last year, some factory-farm employees got their pink slips from Aviagen Turkeys, Inc. in response to PETA's undercover investigation, which documented that workers were breaking turkeys' necks, stomping on their heads, and shoving feces and feed into turkeys' mouths.
Then, in February, a grand jury handed down 19 indictments, including 11 felony charges, against three former Aviagen workers, marking the first time in U.S. history that factory-farm employees have faced felony cruelty-to-animals charges for abusing birds.
Fast forward: Two of the three ex-employees, Scott Alvin White and Edward Eric Gwinn, recently pleaded guilty to cruelty charges. On June 8, White was sentenced to serve one year in jail—the maximum period permitted by law! Today, Gwinn was sentenced to serve six months' home confinement—the maximum period permitted by law—on each count, concurrently, and is banned from living with, owning, and working with animals for five years. The case against the third ex-employee, Walter Lee Hambrick, is pending.
Can't get enough? In September, a grand jury in neighboring Monroe County, West Virginia, may well issue further felony indictments against White and Hambrick.
These historic victories by no means even the score for the turkeys who were punched and thrown or the many other birds who suffered when they were forced to watch as other turkeys were abused at Aviagen. After watching our undercover video, animal behavior expert Dr. Lesley J. Rogers stated, "It is now known that when social animals, like turkeys, see and hear other members of their species under stress or suffering physical injury, their levels of stress become elevated. Hence, the behavioural stress is widespread in the birds in the vicinity of those that have been injured and/or handled roughly."
Still, these convictions will remind workers on other factory farms that if they don't clean up their acts, PETA investigators (and the whistleblowers who tip us off) will have their eyes on them.
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.
Written by Alisa Mullins
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.
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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