PETA Statement: Animal Welfare Violations at Southern Research Institute

For Immediate Release:
October 26, 2021

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

Please see Dr. Alka Chandna, PhD, PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Cases statement regarding a just-obtained federal document indicating critical animal welfare violations at Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Alabama:

Force-feeding potentially poisonous chemicals to vulnerable dogs, monkeys, rabbits, and other animals in painful and deadly tests is business as usual for the contract killers at Birmingham-based Southern Research Institute (SRI), but incompetence and a culture of disregard add to the animals’ suffering. According to a just-posted federal inspection report obtained by PETA, SRI’s failure to ensure safe caging for animals caused a monkey to sustain serious injuries to his mouth and lips after a clamp hanging from the cage to which he was confined became caught in his mouth. In another incident, a hamster’s teeth became stuck in the metal screen that lined the top of the cage in which he was held. The injuries to the hamster were so severe that he had to be euthanized. In yet another incident, experimenters at SRI neglected to feed a hamster for several days. The animal’s condition deteriorated to such an extent that he had to be euthanized.

The thousands of animals experimented on and killed every year in SRI’s laboratories feel pain and value their lives just as much as any of the company’s executives—so SRI would do well to modernize its testing program by leaving archaic and cruel animal tests behind and using only sophisticated, human-relevant testing 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.