Ivy League Busted! Promises to Replace Animals in Laboratories Broken for Years

For Immediate Release:
September 10, 2025

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In letters sent today to Ivy League schools Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale, PETA throws down the gauntlet on the universities’ failure to make good on their stated commitments to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animals in experiments, known as the “3Rs” principle.

First published in 1959, the 3Rs theory was enthusiastically embraced by universities worldwide as a way to phase out the use of animals. But it has been used as a smokescreen to placate the public while studies using animals continued.

PETA demands that Ivy League schools, which have enjoyed billions in public research funding, provide measurable plans for replacing animals with human-relevant research methods, following the example just set by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell have wailed publicly about canceled federal research grants, even as they ignored their own claims that they abide by the 3Rs. Many have been cited for repeatedly violating basic animal welfare regulations.

“The Ivy League schools have spoken out both sides of their mouth for decades, pretending to care about animals even as they caged, cut into, and killed tens of thousands of animals,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “Stop stalling and give us your plan for replacing animals.”

Until her grant was cut in May, Harvard Medical School experimenter Margaret Livingstone ripped newborn monkeys from their mothers and forced them to wear goggles that simulated disorienting strobe lights for the first 18 months of their lives, and sewed other monkeys’ eyes shut. At Columbia University, experimenters cut into rabbits’ cheekbones and punched holes into their jaws to induce osteoarthritis before killing and dissecting them.

Studies show that 90 percent of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to effective treatments for humans, while 95 percent of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals later fail in humans. According to a 2025 poll, 80 to 85 percent of U.S. residents think experiments on animals should be phased out and tax dollars spent on non-animal methods.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on X, Facebook, or Instagram.