UPDATE: Santa Paws brought a gift early this year! We're delighted to share some great news to kick off the holidays—and what could be better than a happy ending for puppies?

Following the dynamic campaigns of PETA and its affiliates worldwide, the 70 4-month-old beagles sent for horrible experiments in an Indian laboratory have just been rescued! A huge "thank-you" to the more than 50,000 compassionate people around the world who e-mailed Indian officials through the websites of PETA and its international affiliates urging them to take action. The dogs have been removed from quarantine and handed over to animal protection groups with the permission of the Ministry of Environment & Forests and through efforts made internally in government by MP Maneka Gandhi. 

During its campaign, PETA India discovered that Beijing Marshall Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (a branch of the notorious animal-breeding facility Marshall BioResources), had sent a letter to the airline used for the animals' transport—which has a longstanding policy against shipping animals to laboratories—giving false assurances that the beagles "won't be hurt or killed as Lab Animal [sic]."

While these 70 lucky dogs have been spared lives of misery and pain in a laboratory, there's still work to be done to keep more animals out of the hands of experimenters in India. Air India recently resumed shipping animals to laboratories; please urge airline officials to stop delivering animals to their torturers and executioners.

 

Originally posted November 13:

Thanks to a whistleblower, PETA India found out that 70 beagles exported from China into India and falsely labeled as "pets" are actually to be used in deadly experiments.  PETA India is calling on the Indian government to conduct an urgent investigation. It has also asked officials to confiscate the dogs and allow the organization to give them a chance at living in peace in adoptive homes instead of facing caging, poisoning, and death in a laboratory.

 As I write, the beagles are being held at Animal Quarantine and Certification Services in Chennai. Their falsified  import paperwork should render the shipment illegal, as PETA India has learned that the animals, sent from commercial breeder Beijing Marshall Biotechnology Co. Ltd., are actually meant for a laboratory at Advinus Therapeutics.

Saving 70 Snoopys

People may generally picture mice, rats, and rabbits when they think about animals used in experiments, but a great many dogs—including puppies and homeless animals from shelters—are tormented and killed in laboratories as well. Dogs are often used in toxicology tests in which they are force-fed massive amounts of a drug, industrial chemical, pesticide, or household product, causing a slow, excruciating death from poisoning.

Oddly, experimenters particularly favor beagles because of their size and their eager-to-please nature—a quality that would normally make a person want to protect and care for them, not torture them.

Making the Connection

Even though I have lived with beagles and beagle mixes since childhood—including my current companions, Beau and Oliver—when it came to understanding the inexcusable cruelty of experimenting on animals, I never quite "got it" until I saw this picture during a PETA conference. That's when I realized that there could be never be sufficient justification for inflicting this kind of suffering on a dog so much like Beau.

Then I realized something else: No animal deserves to be burned, poisoned, mutilated, or killed in a laboratory. They're all living beings with thoughts, feelings, and desires—including the desire to live free from harm—just like my dog. Just like me. Even if animal experimentation produced reliable results (which it doesn't), it's no more ethical to torture a mouse, a rabbit, or a monkey in a laboratory in the name of science than it would be to torture us or our animal companions.

 What You Can Do

PETA and its international affiliates are 100 percent committed to ending the torture of animals in cruel tests and experiments, and they've already won many victories. But there's more to be done—and they need your help. Learn how you can help keep animals out of laboratories.

It's October, which means that every shopping mall looks like the aftermath of a Pepto-Bismol hurricane. Now, don't get me wrong. I care about Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I lost my dear grandmother to the disease, and it runs in my family. So finding a cure for breast cancer is a cause close to my heart—which is exactly why you'll never see me in a pink T-shirt, pink sun visor, or socks replete with pink fuzzy balls.

That's because I'm wary of "pinkwashing"—that's when companies toss a pittance at a breast cancer charity so that they can slap a pink ribbon on their product and rake in more money for themselves. The actual donation that the company makes is often either a low preset amount or a small percentage of the purchase price. Pinkwashing watchdog group Think Before You Pink maintains, "If shopping could cure breast cancer, it would be cured by now."

But my big beef is this: Much of the money goes to fund archaic, cruel animal experiments that still haven't produced a cure, even while cutting-edge non-animal testing methods are readily available. So for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, here are four ways that you can help women more than if you had bought another pink doohickey:

Instead of buying a $40 May28th.me watch with a pink strap, donate $40 to the American Breast Cancer Foundation.

Only 10 percent of the proceeds from May28th.me's pink watch go to charity, and that money is donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, which wastes money on animal experiments. By donating to the American Breast Cancer Foundation, you can help underprivileged breast cancer patients get the care and treatment that they need.

Instead of buying Progresso Soup, donate vegan food to the Breast Cancer Society.

It's not clear whose lives Progresso's "Save Lids to Save Lives" campaign is supposed to save. It's certainly not the women who are eating soup stored in cans that are made with cancer-causing BPA or the animals who are suffering in the experiments that every purchase helps fund via Susan G. Komen for the Cure. You'll do a lot more good by donating healthy vegan food to the Breast Cancer Society to help impoverished patients eat right.

Instead of buying a $35 pink leather Nook cover, donate $35 to the Breast Cancer Fund.

Only $5 from the sale of each of Barnes & Noble's pink leather Nook covers is donated to charity, and that money goes to—you guessed it—a charity that funds animal experiments. By giving the same $35 to the Breast Cancer Fund, you could help do away with the environmental causes of breast cancer, such as the cancer-causing chemicals used by leather tanneries. 

Instead of buying a $150 pink-and-blue Lacoste tote bag, donate $150 to the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. 

When you spend $150, Lacoste will give $15 (are we sensing a pattern here?) to a charity that funds animal experiments. But by giving $150 to the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, you could fund sophisticated, modern non-animal tests and get us that much closer to a cure.

Find out which charities do test on animals and which don't.

Update: After reviewing evidence submitted by PETA, the National Institutes of Health has reprimanded the University of Colorado–Denver (CU) for repeatedly violating federal animal welfare guidelines in its laboratories, criticized it for not reporting the problems, and ordered the university to repay grant money used for noncompliant experiments on animals. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's investigation into CU's laboratories is still underway.

Originally posted January 29:

It's starting to feel like déjà vu: PETA has once again filed formal complaints with the federal government about the abuse of animals in laboratories at the University of Colorado–Denver (CU). Through a state open-records request, PETA has just learned that the same neglect and incompetence that we documented there in a 2007 investigation are still occurring.

The records show that during just the past two years, at least 60 animal welfare incidents—dozens of which may constitute violations of federal law and guidelines—have occurred, including the following:

• A worker broke a rabbit's back as the rabbit struggled against the worker's restraint. The paralyzed animal was still used in an experiment before she was finally killed.
• Experimenters induced cancer in animals and then ineptly cut off the resulting tumors, leaving the animals—who were given no pain relief—with large, gaping wounds.
• Live mice and rats were found in a freezer where dead animals were discarded.
• Twenty guinea pigs died or were killed after a worker injected them with an antibiotic intended for rats.
• A careless employee threw a box of live animals into the trash, leaving the animals to die slowly.

Based on PETA's undercover investigation, in 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cited CU for serious violations of the Animal Welfare Act and also issued the university an official warning letting it know that it would be fined $10,000 per incident if it were found violating the law again. It's time for the government to follow through on that warning and stop CU's abuses for good.

How You Can Help  

Please ask the federal government to stop funding cruel animal experiments and to put your tax dollars toward modern, humane non-animal research methods.

Today would be the 156th birthday of George Bernard Shaw ("Bernard" to his friends), which is an occasion worth noting. If you're not familiar with the work of this independent-minded Irish playwright and provocateur, you're missing out. Shaw managed to speak truth to power with such humor, clarity, and intelligence that the powerful ended up laughing with him, not at him.

We aim to do something similar here at The PETA Files, so we're sure that Bernard—a vegetarian and an opponent of experimentation on animals—would have felt right at home here. Sadly, that can't happen, so instead, we'll share a few quotations from Shaw that still resonate with animal rights advocates today:

• "Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that."
• "If you cannot attain to knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge."
• "A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."
• "When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity."
• "All great truths begin as blasphemies."
• "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
• "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
• "Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
• "The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them."
• "The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."

Are you a dedicated Shavian? You can support a cause near and dear to the great man's heart by supporting PETA's work to make the world a kinder and fairer place for animals.

A primate at a Covance primate testing lab.

Update: After receiving PETA's request for an investigation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that Bristol-Myers Squibb was to blame for the hanging death of the monkey and cited the company for violating the Animal Welfare Act.

 As if being locked inside a laboratory and treated like a living test tube weren't torture enough, a whistleblower informed PETA that a monkey and a rat were recently scalded to death at pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb's laboratory in Pennington, New Jersey. Their cages were run through the high-pressure cage washer with the animals still inside, causing the trapped animals intense agony and terror as the blistering-hot water burned their flesh.

Also according to the whistleblower, another monkey strangled to death after she was attached to the front of her cage, apparently by some sort of leash, and then left unattended. All three of these tragic deaths, which reportedly occurred over a six-month period, could have been easily prevented. So what's going on at Bristol-Myers?

A U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection report substantiates the whistleblower's report of a monkey dying in the cage washer, and based on this, PETA suspects that the other allegations are also true. But it's Bristol-Myers Squibb's turn to be in hot water now: PETA has submitted complaints to the USDA and the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, asking both to investigate and hit the multibillion-dollar company where it hurts—in its bank account—if these allegations are true.

But what the pharma giant really must do is stop subjecting tens of thousands of dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, and monkeys to imprisonment, pain, and death. PETA, which holds stock in Bristol-Myers Squibb specifically for the purpose of addressing the company's board and stockholders, has submitted a shareholder resolution urging it to reduce the company's reliance on animal tests by switching to modern, non-animal methods and to provide greater transparency of its animal testing practices. Please, click here to ask Bristol-Myers Squibb's CEO to take personal responsibility for making sure that these recommendations are implemented.

Following the finding by the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) that a former professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University hurt animals in experiments and then lied about the results to get more federal funding, PETA has sent a letter to the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) urging the agency to take back more than $2.8 million in taxpayer money granted to the disgraced (and disgraceful) vivisector during the period of misconduct.

Mean Methods, False Findings

Specifically, the ORI determined that Michael Miller—formerly a professor and chair of SUNY Upstate's department of neuroscience and physiology—lied about the results of his experiments in which he forced alcohol into pregnant mice, rats, and monkeys. The babies of these animals were then killed and their brains were cut out. Miller submitted the fabricated data in his applications to get even more funding from NIAAA—part of the federal National Institutes of Health—and also sent them to scientific journals. Several journals have already retracted the articles.

Unfortunately, this kind of fraud isn't unheard of. The only animal some experimenters seem to care about is the cash cow—and it appears some of them will do just about anything to keep the grant money flowing. If they're going to lie about the results, they could at least have the decency to leave the animals out and fake the experiments altogether.

How You Can Help Animals in Laboratories

Please tell your representative and senators in Congress to divert public money away from cruel animal experiments like Miller's and into promising, lifesaving, and relevant clinical and non-animal research.

You don't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to know that all mammals need water to survive, yet this basic biology principle is apparently lost on the clever folks at Harvard. For the second time in three months, a monkey has died of dehydration at the Ivy League institution: On Sunday, an elderly cotton-top tamarin was euthanized at Harvard Medical School (HMS) after it was discovered that the monkey's cage had no water bottle, an inexcusable oversight that led the university to suspend new experiments at its New England Primate Research Center (NEPRC).

The monkey's death came on the same day that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) made public an inspection report that revealed three other incidents involving the neglectful endangerment of monkeys at the facility in the past three months, including another monkey's death. This recent series of deaths has prompted PETA to call on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to suspend all funding to HMS and NEPRC and to demand a refund of any grant money spent on activity that violated federal animal protection laws, which is required by federal grant guidelines.

Milo was imprisoned at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC), a facility where PETA conducted a shocking undercover investigation

A History of Violations

The USDA has cited HMS and NEPRC for more than 20 violations of the Animal Welfare Act during the past two years, including the following incidents involving serious injuries and deaths:

• In January of this year, two primates became severely dehydrated and one died. In another incident, a primate suffered two broken bones when his leg was smashed in a heavy cage door. Another primate suffered serious foot injuries after he and others escaped from improperly secured cages.

• In December 2011, a staff member caught an escaped primate with a net, performed an imaging procedure on him, and upon returning the animal to his cage, discovered that he had died.

• In July 2011, a primate had to be euthanized after he was given an overdose of an anesthetic that caused acute kidney failure.

• In June 2010, a primate was found dead in a cage after it was run through a scalding-hot mechanical cage washer.

What PETA is asking for isn't unprecedented. Other universities, including the University of Connecticut and the University of Michigan, have had to return thousands of dollars in grant money after PETA and others uncovered animal welfare violations. After all, it seems only reasonable that our hard-earned tax dollars shouldn't be paying for activity that violates the law.

How You Can Help

While the recent deaths of monkeys at Harvard appear to have resulted from carelessness, HMS and NEPRC confine 2,300 other primates and deliberately commit unspeakable horrors against them, such as drilling holes into their skulls and subjecting them to cocaine addiction experiments. Ask the NIH to stop funding this cruelty at Harvard and elsewhere.

As the U.S. Congress considers the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would permanently ban the use of chimpanzees in invasive experiments and retire all 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, Rampart star Woody Harrelson has written a letter to one of his California senators, Barbara Boxer, on behalf of PETA imploring her in her key role as the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to support the bill:

Less than two weeks after receiving appeals from PETA and PETA Germany, RWTH Aachen University, a top German college, has announced that it will no longer perform invasive and deadly training exercises on live pigs in its advanced surgical course, effective immediately!

Truly 'Advanced' Training

Earlier this month, PETA and PETA Germany sent university officials and the German state veterinary authority a detailed dossier outlining humane and superior surgical training methods that—unlike the cruel procedures then used by RWTH Aachen—wouldn't risk violating German laws requiring the use of non-animal teaching methods when available.

The outreach to RWTH Aachen followed PETA Germany's discovery that as part of the "Advanced Skill Course" at the school's surgical clinic, students were cutting open pigs' chests, inserting tubes, and surgically removing their organs before finally killing the animals.

Move the Momentum to Michigan

While RWTH Aachen and the University of Ulm in Germany have both recently scrapped the crude and archaic use of pigs in labs in favor of training surgeons on modern and sophisticated 21st century technology, some U.S. facilities—including the University of Michigan—continue to cut holes into pigs' limbs, throats, and chests and stab needles into their bones and hearts for trauma training exercises even though superior simulation methods exist.

How You Can Help These Pigs

Please tell officials at the University of Michigan to cut out cruel trauma training on pigs and start using humane, contemporary methods of instruction instead.

A new PETA ad campaign is rolling out in St. Louis to make sure that Washington University's faculty, staff, students, and supporters don't forget about the school's use of live cats for painful and terrifying medical training conducted in conjunction with St. Louis Children's Hospital. 

Washington University folks will be confronted by images of cats like those who have tubes forced down their throats in the university's Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course (most other PALS courses have upgraded to modern, sophisticated simulators) pretty much everywhere they look:

• In Their Newspapers
  Both the Washington University newspaper and the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offer this reminder of the shameful practice: 

© iStockphoto.com/Dan Brandenburg

• While Filling Up
  Gas stations near the campus will feature this hard-to-miss ad on top of their pumps:

© iStockphoto.com/Grigoriy Lukyanov

• Online
  Even if people stay home, this Google ad should grab their attention:

How You Can Help These Cats

Please join us in telling Washington University and St. Louis Children's Hospital that it's time to get with the program and scratch cruelty to cats out of their curriculum.