PETA Statement: Animal Welfare Violations at Legacy Health

For Immediate Release:
October 26, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the statement from Dr. Alka Chandna, PhD, PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Cases, regarding a just-obtained federal document indicating critical animal welfare violations at Legacy Health in Portland, Oregon:

It strains credulity to believe that an institution that cannot administer anesthesia without killing an animal patient can be trusted to deliver optimum healthcare. Just-released government documents obtained by PETA reveal that Legacy Health was cited for a critical violation of federal animal welfare laws for failing to ensure adequate veterinary care for a monkey who had been used in an experimental procedure. A valve on the anesthesia machine had been left closed, and the monkey experienced difficulty breathing and eventually endured what must have been a painful and distressing death from pressure-related trauma to the lungs.

The hundreds of animals—including monkeys, sheep, pigs, and genetically modified mice—experimented on and killed every year in Legacy Health’s laboratories feel pain and value their lives just as much as any of the company’s executives—so Legacy Health would do well to modernize its experimentation program by leaving archaic and cruel animal tests behind and using only sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.