Last week, champagne corks were popping at PETA HQ following the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) announcement that it is suspending funding for new experiments on chimpanzees because most of these studies are as scientifically unjustifiable as they are morally bankrupt.  

Now we want to make certain that the rest of the vile vivisection industry gets the message too. So we purchased stock in the notorious private contract laboratory BIOQUAL for the express purpose of introducing a shareholder resolution calling on the company to stop tormenting chimpanzees in experiments.

For all you animal rights historians, BIOQUAL used to be called SEMA and was the site of a famous 1987 nighttime raid that blew the lid off the abysmal conditions for chimpanzees in laboratories. Video footage taken inside the facility revealed that baby chimpanzees were locked individually in tiny steel boxes in rooms so dark that employees had to bring flashlights to check on them. Following the release of the footage, Jane Goodall visited the laboratory and was so horrified that she called for its closure, describing it as "one of the very worst."

Apparently, not much has changed at BIOQUAL in the last quarter century. In one recent experiment at the facility, six young chimpanzees were separated from their mothers, locked in individual cages, and exposed to norovirus, which causes diarrhea, vomiting, and stomach pain. The chimpanzees—who were as young as 2 years old—were then subjected to months of painful biopsies in which pieces of their organs were removed. The recent Institute of Medicine report determined that norovirus is one of the many diseases for which chimpanzees are not needed in order to find a cure.

While we hit BIOQUAL's boardroom to try to talk some sense into the hard-hearted execs there, you can help chimpanzees by clicking here to ask your members of Congress to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would prohibit all invasive experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes.

Written by Jeremy Beckham

Update: PETA has just received more good news for animals in laboratories: Tox21, an ongoing collaboration among the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, will use a high-speed robotic screening system—not animals—to test 10,000 chemicals for toxicity. This switch will prevent countless animals from suffering in painful and antiquated tests. Could the government actually be moving into the 21st century on this issue?

The scientists in our Regulatory Testing Division always appreciate PETA supporters who respond to their (ahem) somewhat technical action alerts. And they especially appreciate the more than 25,000 of you who responded over the past year to our alert calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use non-animal methods to reduce the numbers of animals to be killed in the agency's massive endocrine-disruptor screening program (EDSP). 

On Tuesday, your efforts paid off, and the EPA issued a statement pledging to implement changes to the EDSP that have the potential to save more than 3 million animals!

The EPA's new work plan, EDSP21, will use non-animal methods such as computer models and tests known as "high-throughput assays." In issuing EDSP21, the EPA stated that by incorporating advances in computational modeling, molecular biology, and toxicology, "EPA will prioritize and screen chemicals with greater speed, efficiency, and accuracy, while minimizing the use of laboratory animals."

PETA's scientists worked exhaustively over the past five years to push the EPA in this direction by publishing op-eds; submitting legal petitions, technical comments, and testimony; lobbying; and making presentations at conferences and workshops. Six months ago, PETA published an article in a scientific journal and provided the EPA with a clear pathway that is strikingly similar to what the EPA is now planning to implement. 

The EPA's current EDSP program requires the use of approximately 500 animals per chemical screened for potential interaction with the endocrine system. Since the EPA has estimated that there are between 6,000 and 9,700 chemicals to be prioritized and screened, the potential to save animal lives is huge. PETA will, of course, remain hyper-vigilant to ensure that the EPA follows through on this commitment.

We're also keeping the pressure on Congress to end invasive experiments on chimpanzees and retire all the federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries. You can now help get chimpanzees out of laboratories and into sanctuaries by clicking here to urge your congressional representatives to pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act.

Written by Jessica Sandler

© Jessica Florence

A new experiment has once again shown that rats in laboratories have empathy for one another. In the experiment, one rat was placed in a cage with another rat who was stuffed into a tiny tube from which he or she was unable to escape. The "free" rat worked frantically to get his or her distressed friend out, even when a tempting chocolate treat was offered as a distraction.

This is far from the first time that altruism has been seen in animals used for experimentation. In one notoriously cruel experiment, macaque monkeys were given food only if they pulled a chain that electrically shocked another monkey. Nearly all the monkeys preferred to go hungry, and one macaque starved himself for 12 days. Monkeys who had previously been shocked were even more reluctant to pull the chain and subject another individual to such punishment. In PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk's book The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights, she quotes astronomer Carl Sagan, who asks, "If the circumstances were reversed, and captive humans were offered the same deal by macaque scientists, would we do as well?"

Millions of kind, intelligent rats and other animals are poisoned, blinded, and killed every year in cruel experiments. You can show your empathy by clicking here to urge members of Congress to amend the Animal Welfare Act to include the protection of both rats and mice. Also, please only support companies and charities that don't test on animals.

Written by Monica Alexander

Sister72 | cc by 2.0

After more than a year of campaigning by PETA and supporters—and a day after the release of a shocking PETA exposé—the University of Michigan (U-M) announced that it has ended the use of cats in its Survival Flight intubation training laboratory.

More than 100,000 people—including Michigan natives Iggy Pop and Lily Tomlin—called on U-M to replace crude and cruel live-animal laboratories with more humane and effective human simulators, which are already used for other U-M courses. The U-M student group Michigan Animal Rights Society led demonstrations in support of the effort, the student assembly passed a resolution urging the school to end the laboratories, and the student newspaper editorial board came out in favor of replacing animals with simulators. PETA supporters even jammed university circuit boards with phone calls to protest the Survival Flight animal laboratories.

U-M says that it still plans to harm and kill pigs to teach other skills in the Survival Flight training course, and PETA will continue to push the school to replace all animal use with simulators that are already available on campus.

Of course, this victory would not have been possible without the help of our supporters. Help us keep up the momentum by clicking here to urge St. Louis Children's Hospital to join U-M and nearly every other facility in the country by replacing the use of animals with simulators for intubation training.

He was a pretty, healthy, brown tabby cat when his guardians took him to a Michigan animal shelter in the hope of finding him a new home. But a heartless shelter director, a shady animal dealer, and a university hell-bent on abusing animals in crude and painful medical training exercises took away his chance at a happy ending.

Knowing full well that he would end up in a lab, the staff at Gratiot County Animal Shelter turned the cat over to notorious Class B animal dealer R&R Research, which in turn sold him to the University of Michigan (U-M). There, he was given the ID number 8269 and tormented in Survival Flight training labs for nurses by having hard plastic tubes repeatedly shoved down his delicate windpipe. A few days later, when U-M was done abusing 8269, they killed him. Another cat who was subjected to this cruel intubation laboratory, 8312, had been obtained from someone who gave her away "free to a good home." The cat was illegally acquired by R&R before being sold to U-M.

The stories of 8269 and the other cats killed by U-M were uncovered when PETA obtained records from Gratiot County and U-M. They reveal that U-M officials—including the director of the Survival Flight program—have shamelessly lied to the public by repeatedly stating in a newspaper opinion column, comments to the media, and official statements that the cats used in the archaic Survival Flight lab are always adopted out afterward.

While we were shocked to learn about U-M's illicit relationship with one of the most despicable animal dealers in the country and to discover that U-M has been blatantly lying about the fate of the cats, it really shouldn't have come as any surprise. U-M officials have been misleadingly claiming for a year that modern human-patient simulators can't replace the cat laboratories, even though these simulators are already used in the place of animals to teach intubation to doctors and nurses in other courses at U-M.

You can help prevent more cats from being betrayed like 8269 by clicking here to e-mail U-M officials and demanding that they replace the use of cats in these labs with the superior human-patient simulators that the school already owns.

It's that time of year when all you want to do is find the perfect comfy chair (or vegetable aisle) to hibernate in, but why not curl up with some steamy Internet Soup instead?

• My Nana always said, "No tushies on the table."
• At least this roadkill-craving mother-to-be isn't in denial about the fact that meat is rotting flesh.
• Toys, art, and science collide in one of the coolest alternatives to the use of animals in dissection that we've ever seen. Next up: a Lego fetal pig?
• It's hard out there for vivisectors, what with public sculptures shaming them and all.
• PETA-approved animal heads? Go wild!

In a move that has been a decade in the making, pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk has announced that it will no longer use animals in quality-control tests of each batch of the biological products—including vaccines—that it manufactures. This move will spare more than 700 animals every year. 

Scientists in PETA's Regulatory Testing Division (RTD) have been working for years to promote the implementation of non-animal methods for vaccine batch–testing and recently published an article in the science journal Animals highlighting the multipronged approach that they have used to save thousands of animals' lives. 

Of the approximately 10 million animals used annually to produce vaccines, about 80 percent are used in horrifyingly painful testing that is conducted for each batch of vaccines, so it is easy to understand why RTD's work is critically important. 

Among the successes detailed in the journal article was pushing industry to take full advantage of available alternatives to the use of hamsters and other animals for testing the leptospirosis vaccine. PETA also tackled erysipelas testing and achieved an exciting victory when the U.S. Department of Agriculture replaced the protocol for testing on pigs with the non-animal method. 

RTD continues to hammer away at other gruesome government-mandated experiments, including the one for rabies batch potency–testing, which requires injecting hundreds of mice with the rabies virus—for each batch of rabies vaccine. The injections go through the animals' skulls and directly into their brains. Half of the animals receive a protective vaccine, while the others do not. Most of the unprotected mice die painfully and slowly from convulsions, loss of muscle control, and eventual suffocation. 

Not only are the tests for vaccine potency typically very painful, drawn out, and lethal for animals, regulators also agree that they are not as effective as modern methods of testing vaccine strength and safety. Better, more precise tests have been developed but have not yet been validated for use. 

You can help support RTD's efforts to pressure government agencies to validate effective, sophisticated alternatives to animal tests by donating today. 

Italy had Leonardo da Vinci, India had Mahatma Gandhi, England had William Wilberforce, and America had Mark Twain.

Courtesy of LOC; LC-USZ62-117717

Like these other luminaries, Twain was a committed advocate for the humane treatment of animals. In honor of his 176^th birthday, we've selected one of his most powerful and impassioned statements to share. Of course, since it comes from Mark Twain, there's also a dose of humor thrown in:

To read more about Mark Twain's thoughts on animals in celebration of this early animal advocate's birthday, check out Mark Twain's Book of Animals.

As part of a four-part series on chimpanzees in laboratories published this week, Wired.com tells the story of a chimpanzee named Katrina who was taken from her mother as an infant to be infected with HIV and hepatitis B and C, even though chimpanzees' bodies don't react to these diseases in the same way as humans' do. Katrina was anesthetized almost 300 times by the age of 15 and was never given any painkillers after numerous invasive liver biopsies. This caged, lonely life, punctuated by fear and pain, so traumatized Katrina that she developed symptoms of severe post-traumatic stress disorder and has lost a third of her body weight.

Tragically, despite the fact that Katrina was supposedly retired in 2002, she is one of 14 chimpanzees who were sent to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research eight years later for use in more invasive and painful infectious disease experiments. (Pressure from PETA and other groups successfully halted the transfer of 200 other chimpanzees.) Katrina's plight graphically illustrates how high the stakes are in the fight to ban experiments on great apes.

The Wired series and another story that ran this week in The New York Times come just weeks before the Institute of Medicine's scheduled December release of its report on the issue.

Last month, the editors at Scientific American came out in favor of banning experiments on chimpanzees. To continue to build momentum for the ban, please also post positive comments in response to the Wired and Times articles. Click here to ask your members of Congress to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would ban invasive experiments on all great apes and retire all federally owned chimpanzees currently in laboratories to sanctuaries.

The University of Utah just got slapped with an official warning from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for repeatedly violating the federal Animal Welfare Act by failing to properly review and oversee experiments on animals. If the university is caught violating this law again, it could face up to $10,000 in fines per incident.

The USDA's action was based in part on violations that were uncovered following PETA's 2009 undercover investigation that brought to light the terrible suffering of the dogs, cats, monkeys, rabbits, and other animals experimented on there. We documented that monkeys were deprived of water so that they would cooperate with experimenters in exchange for a sip of water, that a kitten died from dehydration, and that other sick and injured animals were denied veterinary care and left to languish and eventually die. You may recall that many of the animals the school was using in experiments were homeless cats and dogs it had purchased from local animal shelters until an intense year-long PETA campaign put an end to pound seizure in Utah. Since this landmark victory, several animal experiments at the U have been completely halted. 

You can help animals suffering at the University of Utah and in other horrendous laboratories by clicking here to ask the federal government to divert tax dollars away from cruel animal experiments and put them toward modern and humane non-animal research methods.