Tragic news from the U.K.: A huge fire at an animal-breeding center in southwest England early Tuesday morning killed more than 350 guinea pigs, (some reports are indicating that as many as 1,000 animals may have died, including guinea pigs, rabbits, and rats).
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Police believe the fire may have been caused by an electrical fault, but mass-breeding facilities are notorious for keeping animals in dangerous and inadequate conditions and neglecting even their most basic needs for safety, food, water, exercise, and veterinary care. Case in point: U.S. Global Exotics, where PETA’s undercover investigator found, among other abuses, that animals were being confined to soda bottles and milk jugs and tossed into freezers to die slowly instead of being taken to a veterinarian.
Let’s hope that this tragic fire causes people to realize that confining animals and forcing them to bring more offspring into a world that already doesn’t have enough good homes for all the guinea pigs, rabbits, and rats who already exist is never in the animals’ best interest.
Written by Lindsay Pollard-Post
