PETA to CU-Boulder: Replace Cruel Classroom Experiments On Animals With Simulations

Group Urges School to Modernize Classrooms With Humane Non-Animal Teaching Tools Used at CU-Denver

For Immediate Release:
October 23, 2012

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382 

Boulder, Colo. -- Following months of attempts to open dialogue with faculty members at the University of Colorado‒Boulder (CU-Boulder) about cruel and deadly classroom experiments on rats and frogs, PETA has filed a formal complaint with the university's animal experimentation oversight committee calling for an end to the archaic practice of decapitating, cutting up, and killing animals when more effective modern methods are available.

According to documents obtained by PETA through a Colorado Open Records Act request, students in CU-Boulder's biology classes cut off frogs' heads and remove the animals' muscles and nerves. In psychology experiments, students force rats to swim in water mazes to the point of exhaustion and despair. In other experiments, live rats have their hearts removed so that students can apply various drugs, and students place fish in tanks and then add "intruder" fish and watch them fight.

CU-Boulder hurts animals even though modern non-animal teaching methods—such as interactive computer simulations—have been shown to teach better than cruel animal laboratories and are used instead at many other schools. CU-Denver offers similar courses and has confirmed that it does not use any live animals in classroom experiments.

"Having students torment and kill animals for an ‘A’ is barbaric and doesn't make them better scientists," says PETA Senior Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. "CU-Boulder's students can and should learn without killing by using the same superior, humane non-animal methods that schools like CU-Denver are already using instead of deadly animal labs."

For more information, please visit PETA.org.