North Dakota State University Ranked Among Worst Animal Testing Offenders

PETA’s Interactive ‘Failed Tests’ Resource Calls Out School for Using Hundreds of Animals in Cruel Experiments

For Immediate Release:
September 5, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

As the school year begins at North Dakota State University (NDSU), PETA is alerting students to its new interactive feature, “Failed Tests,” which ranks colleges as “bad,” “worse,” or “worst” for animals—and NDSU, which used dozens of dogs, cats, pigs, rabbits, horses, and other animals in experiments last year, is among the “worst.”

NDSU received more than $6 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health in 2018. That year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the university for two critical violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act, including for an incident in which 11 lambs died from trauma after being confined to a small pen with more than 200 other sheep and another incident in which several pigs died of dehydration after staff failed to provide them with water.

“Students live and work on university campuses for years without knowing that animals are being neglected, traumatized, burned, poisoned, crippled, blinded, and subjected to other cruel treatment right under their noses,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “As the new school year begins, PETA is asking caring North Dakota State University students to speak out against the abuse of sensitive, sentient beings in their midst.”

A 2018 Pew Research poll found that the majority of Americans oppose animal experimentation, with opposition even greater among younger demographics such as college students. No animal test is prohibited by law, no matter how painful or irrelevant, and mice, rats, birds, reptiles, and amphibians are excluded from protection under federal law.

Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic science research—much of it involving animal experimentation—fail to lead to treatments for humans. And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence toward other animals. For more information, please click here.