PETA Campaign Prompts CU-Boulder to Reconsider Deadly Animal Experiments
University Orders Faculty to Review Use of Live Animals; Experts Push School to Use Non-Animal Teaching Methods
For Immediate Release:
June 25, 2013
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Boulder, Colo. — Following formal complaints filed by PETA and more than 35,000 e-mails from the public, the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder) has ordered its curriculum committee to conduct an in-depth review—due July 31—of the use of live animals in cruel and deadly classroom experiments.
According to new documents obtained by PETA through a Colorado Open Records Act request, faculty must provide new justifications for continuing to subject animals to harmful experiments in light of the more effective, humane and economical non-animal teaching methods that are now available. To contribute to this review, PETA and award-winning university scientists—including renowned CU-Boulder professor emeritus Marc Bekoff— have provided the curriculum committee with detailed information on non-animal teaching methods, such as interactive computer simulations, and PETA has offered to donate these resources to the school.
PETA has also posted an action alert on its popular website that visitors can use to e-mail school officials and urge them to replace the use of animals with humane learning tools.
“CU-Boulder desperately needs to catch up to the universities around the world—including its sister campus in Denver—that have abandoned cruel classroom animal laboratories in favor of more effective and humane 21st century educational tools,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. “PETA will gladly step up to provide the school with the resources it needs to modernize its curriculum, as we have at other facilities around the world.”
Currently, students in CU-Boulder’s biology, physiology, and psychology classes cut off frogs’ heads and experiment on the animals’ muscles, skin, and nerves; force terrified rats to swim in water mazes; and cut open live rats in order to apply drugs to their exposed hearts. These exercises have continued even though non-animal teaching methods have been shown to teach better than cruel animal laboratories and even though non-animal methods are used instead at many other schools, including the University of Colorado-Denver, which has confirmed that it uses no live animals in classroom experiments.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
