Animals don’t smoke. Or do they?
Everyone old enough to strike a match knows that cigarettes cause respiratory problems, emphysema, heart disease, and cancer. Even cigarette manufacturers have been forced to admit that they are selling tiny addictive packets of death.

So why would anyone still use animals in smoking experiments?

As you read these words, pregnant monkeys at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center (ORPRC) are being kept caged, and their fetuses are being exposed to nicotine. Funded by the U.S. government, ORPRC experimenter Eliot Spindel acknowledges that “the deleterious effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy are all too well established.” Yet his five-year study, during which he will kill and examine the lungs of the baby monkeys, is funded (with tax money) through 2004.

This is just one of dozens of examples of cruel and completely unnecessary research. Experimenters have taken large grants from cigarette manufacturers Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, from government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health, and even from the March of Dimes to inject animals with nicotine, force them to inhale smoke, and addict them to tobacco—a substance that they would never normally encounter.

Executive Stress
James D. Valentine, an experimenter at the Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation subjected rats to “unavoidable stress”—often a euphemism for pain. The purpose? To see if they would take in more nicotine.

Other experimenters have designed miniature injection pumps that are then implanted into animals to supply a steady stream of nicotine.

Smoking experiments on rabbits, lambs, dogs, and other animals waste millions of dollars that could be used for a good purpose—to encourage young people to stay away from cigarettes and to help smokers who are already addicted.

“The fact that otherwise intelligent human beings continue to kill themselves by using your products, despite evidence that doing so is tantamount to committing suicide, is no fault of the animals.”
—from PETA’s letter to cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris

PETA is asking the government to keep grant money from lining these experimenters’ pockets, and we are demanding that Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds stop sponsoring animal studies.

Please join us in protesting these painful, unnecessary experiments.

• Ask your legislators to stop funding smoking experiments on animals. For contact information: in the U.S.,check out www.senate.com and www.house.gov or call 202-224-3121; in Canada, call 613-992-4793; in the UK, call 020 7219 4272.

• Write to Andrew J. Schindler, Chair and President, R.J. Reynolds, 401 N. Main St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101, and to Geoffrey C. Bible, Chair, Philip Morris, 120 Park Ave., New York, NY 10017.

Because animals don’t develop smoking-related diseases in the same way that human smokers do, tobacco companies used animal studies to claim that cigarettes were safe, delaying warning labels on cigarette packages for decades. The same companies are still killing animals.

At PETA’s request, legendary actor Jack Lemmon wrote to the U.S. Congressional Appropriations Committee to protest government-funded cigarette smoking tests on animals. As a result, the committee has now directed the National Institutes of Health to “carefully review the use of nonhuman animals.”