PETA to Alabama Department of Public Health: Shut Down Animal Labs

Amid Rising COVID-19 Cases, Group Slams Waste of Animals’ Lives, Taxpayer Money and Risk to Public Health

For Immediate Release:
November 23, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Spiking COVID-19 cases are compromising Alabama’s reopening plan, and PETA is calling on the Alabama Department of Public Health to cut cruel animal experiments statewide—starting with tests on animals, many of whom institutions deemed in response to the pandemic to be non-essential—and protect human health by having staff not come into laboratories to conduct worthless experiments.

In its letter, PETA points out that during the initial COVID-19 shutdown, the University of Alabama–Birmingham (UAB) instructed its experimenters to “limit in-person scholarship to essential research” and to mark “priority cages,” suggesting that the school planned to kill animals who weren’t in these categories.

PETA questions why animals deemed by the university to be extraneous are being bought, bred, trapped, or experimented on in the first place and notes that staff conducting these experiments are being put at unnecessary risk as a result of working in close proximity to others. Also, if animal testing resumes and Alabama shuts down again, more animals may be euthanized, wasting tax money that could have funded superior, human-relevant studies.

“This pandemic should be a wake-up call to shift away from experiments on animals and toward a ‘new normal’ of modern, non-animal research methods,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on state officials to learn from the past and keep all animals from suffering in cruel and wasteful tests.”

More than 90% of results from basic scientific research—much involving animal testing—fails to lead to treatments for humans, and 95% of new medications found to be safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA previously called for an audit of public money, personnel, property, equipment, and space used by UAB for animal tests deemed non-essential, noting that the university received $253 million in state appropriations in the last fiscal year, some of which may have funded such animal experiments.

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 or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.