Experimenters Jam Needles Into Dogs’ Spinal Cords at UMass Chan

PETA recently exposed the endless horrors baby pigs, ferrets, and other animals endure in laboratories at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (UMass Chan). The university has no shortage of neglectful staff who ignore blatant suffering and deprive the animals they imprison of basic care.

Yet among this clique of callousness, there’s one experimenter whose depravity plunges far beyond the pale: Matt Gounis, who makes his living by giving dogs strokes and repeatedly carving them open in gruesome surgeries before killing them.

And worse, PETA has found that Gounis himself helms the one university oversight committee that is supposed to be the last line of defense for protecting animals from unmitigated misery.

Hell on Earth for Dogs

Gounis’ laboratory purchases puppies when they are just four months old. Experimenters slice deep into dogs’ necks, expose and cut their blood vessels, and sew in veins removed from elsewhere in their bodies to cause abnormal bulges known as aneurysms.

The dogs then endure another round of invasive surgeries as experimenters implant devices into their bodies by cutting into their thighs, pushing apart layers of their muscle tissues, exposing and slicing up arteries, and threading catheters through the blood vessels.

The torment doesn’t stop there. The dogs are then subjected to up to five follow-up procedures in which experimenters surgically reopen the animals’ femoral artery and thread imaging equipment to the artificial aneurysm in the neck to force them through extended invasive imaging, causing a cycle of agonizing pain and distress. Despite federal law that prohibits animals from being used in more than one major surgery from which the animal is allowed to recover, Gounis, with the IACUC’s rubber-stamp approval, classified multiple highly invasive survival surgeries as minor, thereby circumventing the safeguard.

Still, experimenters march on, inflicting misery. In one final invasive procedure, experimenters insert a large needle into the dogs’ lower backs and jam imaging equipment along their spinal cords. After being repeatedly restrained, bled, starved, and confined alone in a laboratory cage, experimenters cap off their reign of terror by killing each and every dog used in their cruel tests.

No One to Protect Them

Since at least May 2022, Matt Gounis has operated as chair of the university’s animal care committee, meaning he oversaw the rubber-stamping of countless experiments on animals—including his own.

The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee is a federally mandated body that evaluates every proposed experiment on animals. It’s supposed to objectively protect animals from excessive pain and distress, beyond the “requirements” of the experiments. Gounis’ involvement compromises its integrity, and aligns with a disturbing trend PETA has found of universities across the country that stack their animal oversight committees with industry insiders, greenlighting cruel experiments while raking in federal cash.

Without adequate safeguards, dogs suffer. Whistleblower information and photos shared with PETA show dogs at UMass Chan are kept in a chronic state of hunger, with visible ribs and hip bones, to keep their weight down and prevent the school from having to build larger kennels.

Staff also fail to provide basic care, allowing numerous dogs to suffer oozing wounds, extreme weight loss, and more. One dog developed a baseball-sized sack of fluid on her leg, but staff provided no treatment, even after the lump hardened weeks later. Another young dog was forced through invasive tests, even after she became emaciated and suffered bruises, cuts, and fluid-filled sacs at surgical sites.

What You Can Do

PETA has learned that Gounis’ laboratory has purchased more dogs to torment and kill. PETA is urging UMass Chan’s chancellor to remove Gounis from his position on the university’s animal care committee and revoke approval for his experiments.

Please add your voice to ours. TAKE ACTION today and urge UMass Chan to get out of the cruel and pointless animal tormenting business altogether and switch to human-relevant, non-animal research methods.