Rama / CC by 2.0 France The Onion—in a 2004 article that was recently re-posted on the front page of the gag mag’s website—says scientists torture mice just for laughs. This “report” is so cleverly written that when I sent it to Kathy Guillermo, PETA’s vice president of laboratory investigations, she had “palpitations,” as she … Read more »
Patrick Gijsbers / CC by 2.0 Victory Update: Following a year of vigorous campaigning, PETA has learned that government officials have grounded plans for a cruel and ineffective radiation experiment on monkeys. Learn more about this victory for monkeys. TiVo alert: April Evans, my nominee for Gutsiest Animal Defender of the Year, is scheduled to … Read more »
Animals across Japan are making a bid for freedom (hopefully, captive animals everywhere are taking notes). First, a dolphin who was being forced to perform stupid tricks for loud, obnoxious audiences day in and day out at Japan’s Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium decided that he’d had enough. During a performance, he leaped over the side of … Read more »
Life can be treacherous for everyone living in a war zone. Homeless dogs have been gunned down in Baghdad, and there are even rumors that the Taliban are training monkeys to use guns. (Hey, I said that it’s a rumor.) But thanks to a few big-hearted Marines, two lucky cats, now named Kiki and Keykey, … Read more »
The following posting originally appeared in The Sacramento Bee. If anyone out there is still wondering about the superiority of alternatives to animal tests, look no further than what is happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico. In its efforts to assist the devastated region, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is saving time, … Read more »
Thomas Lersch / CC by 3.0 Update: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson has written to National Institutes of Health Director Francis S. Collins urging him to scrap plans to transfer more than 200 “retired” chimpanzees from the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research laboratory in Texas. He has … Read more »
Animals in laboratories are often kept in barren cages. This monkey was observed during PETA’s investigation into Covance. Business as usual at the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) has just cost the university a whopping $62,500. That’s what KUMC has agreed to pay in fines after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found 160 … Read more »
We send our condolences today to Joyce Brabner, the widow of underground comic book genius Harvey Pekar, who recently died. We remember the days when Joyce visited our office in sparkly Wizard of Oz Dorothy slippers and colored ankle socks. She is a socially astute fighter for animal rights who created the classic Animal Rights … Read more »
“The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club.” If, however, the fight club involves forcing mice to battle one another in a stupid and barbaric experiment, you know we’re going to talk about it. Recently, vivisectors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (sheep abuse ring a bell?) studied the effect … Read more »
We’ve never understood why any child needs to poke around inside an amphibian, but holy “Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County“: iTunes now offers a virtual frog dissection iPad app! In honor of this sophisticated and humane alternative to dissection, PETA is presenting its creator, Emantras Interactive Technologies, with a Mark Twain Ethical Science Award. … Read more »
Victory Update: Following a year of vigorous campaigning, PETA has learned that government officials have grounded plans for a cruel and ineffective radiation experiment on monkeys. Learn more about this victory for monkeys. Employees at Brookhaven National Laboratory might have thought that their ears where playing tricks on them when they showed up at work … Read more »
pazzani / CC by 2.0 Victory Update: Following a year of vigorous campaigning, PETA has learned that government officials have grounded plans for a cruel and ineffective radiation experiment on monkeys. Learn more about this victory for monkeys. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that NASA’s plan to fund an experimenter … Read more »
Mark Twain may be famous for his love of steamboats and jumping frogs, but some people may not be aware that he was also staunchly opposed to experiments on animals. He once wrote the following in a letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society: “I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results … Read more »
“I am not a guinea pig.” That’s the ironic name of the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) new campaign to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). I say “ironic” because, as the EDF itself points out in a blog post debuting the campaign, humans are not guinea pigs. And yet the very thing that EDF … Read more »
As NASA public affairs specialist Stephanie Schierholz took to the stage at Monday’s TWTRCON to weigh in on “customer service,” animal defenders elsewhere took to their Twitter accounts and took over the #TWTRCON hashtag—specifically weighing in on NASA’s plan to fund a misguided, cruel, and wasteful experiment in which dozens of squirrel monkeys would be … Read more »