PETA Denounces New Government Stats: No Pain Relief for 50K Animals in Labs

For Immediate Release:
May 3, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna’s statement regarding the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s just-released number of animals held and used in U.S. laboratories in 2019, including 49,422 used in experiments in which they endured unrelieved pain (Column E).

The new figures are out, and U.S. laboratories subjected nearly 50,000 animals to experiments in 2019 that caused immense pain—without any pain relief—a shameful admission that the U.S. has failed to move ahead with the times and avail itself of modern research methods. It is an indisputable fact that animal experiments fail to lead to treatments for humans, and this callous disregard for the suffering of sentient beings has us lagging behind other countries, both scientifically and ethically. State-of-the-art research methods, from organs-on-a-chip to supercomputers, provide far more sophisticated, effective results than electroshocking a monkey or putting owls in head restraints. It’s time to take the animal experimenters out of the driver’s seat and put modern scientists in charge.

The USDA’s figures do not include the mice, rats, reptiles, amphibians, fish, or other species who feel pain and fear and constitute more than 95% of animals in laboratories yet are not meaningfully protected by any federal law.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.