Written by Michelle Kretzer
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:
[N]early 1,000 of these complex beings are locked inside barren cells in U.S. laboratories—some for as long as 50 years—where they have been intentionally infected with diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis and forced to endure decades of invasive procedures, fear, loneliness, and pain. This hellish experience leaves lifelong emotional scars on chimpanzees, and many of them resort to self-mutilation or suffer from depression and other psychological disorders for years after experiencing the trauma of having their minds and bodies violated.
Written by Jeff Mackey
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!
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.
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.
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:
© iStockphoto.com/Dan Brandenburg
© iStockphoto.com/Grigoriy Lukyanov
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.
A bit of good news from the Great White North: After years of pressure from animal rights activists—and after hearing from PETA recently—Air Canada, one of only two major North American airlines that still fly primates to laboratories, is taking steps to end the shipments. The airline has requested permission from the Canadian Transportation Agency (CTA) to enact a ban on transporting primates destined for experiments, a practice that the CTA currently requires Air Canada to engage in. PETA had been in contact with Air Canada about its policy as part of an international campaign to stop airlines from transporting primates to laboratories, where they will be caged, experimented on, and killed.
Recently, PETA exposed appalling cruelty to monkeys at one of the largest importers of primates in the U.S.—Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL) in Everett, Washington—after being contacted by a distraught worker there. The photos and video footage recorded by the whistleblower show sick, distressed monkeys suffering after being injected with chemicals and subjected to violent handling.
Please support the growing number of compassionate and progressive airlines—including Delta, American Airlines, and British Airways—that are saying "No" to primate abuse, and click here to ask the Canadian Transport Authority to grant Air Canada's request to ban the shipment of primates to labs.
Click here to ask the Canadian Transport Authority to grant Air Canada’s request to ban the shipment of primates to labs
Written by PETA
Last week, champagne corks were popping at PETA HQ following the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) announcement that it is suspending funding for new experiments on chimpanzees because most of these studies are as scientifically unjustifiable as they are morally bankrupt.
Now we want to make certain that the rest of the vile vivisection industry gets the message too. So we purchased stock in the notorious private contract laboratory BIOQUAL for the express purpose of introducing a shareholder resolution calling on the company to stop tormenting chimpanzees in experiments.
For all you animal rights historians, BIOQUAL used to be called SEMA and was the site of a famous 1987 nighttime raid that blew the lid off the abysmal conditions for chimpanzees in laboratories. Video footage taken inside the facility revealed that baby chimpanzees were locked individually in tiny steel boxes in rooms so dark that employees had to bring flashlights to check on them. Following the release of the footage, Jane Goodall visited the laboratory and was so horrified that she called for its closure, describing it as "one of the very worst."
Apparently, not much has changed at BIOQUAL in the last quarter century. In one recent experiment at the facility, six young chimpanzees were separated from their mothers, locked in individual cages, and exposed to norovirus, which causes diarrhea, vomiting, and stomach pain. The chimpanzees—who were as young as 2 years old—were then subjected to months of painful biopsies in which pieces of their organs were removed. The recent Institute of Medicine report determined that norovirus is one of the many diseases for which chimpanzees are not needed in order to find a cure.
While we hit BIOQUAL's boardroom to try to talk some sense into the hard-hearted execs there, you can help chimpanzees by clicking here to ask your members of Congress to cosponsor and support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would prohibit all invasive experiments on chimpanzees and other great apes.
Written by Jeremy Beckham
Just hours after the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine (IOM) announced the findings of its long-awaited report on the scientific validity of experiments on chimpanzees, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which commissioned the report, announced that it was suspending funding for any new experiments on chimpanzees. All currently funded experiments on chimpanzees will be re-evaluated, and funding for many may end.
You may remember that we testified at the IOM committee's hearing on the issue last summer. The committee listened to us and to the scientists who testified and concluded that "most current biomedical research use of chimpanzees is not necessary."
© Smileus | iStockPhoto.com
NIH had originally commissioned the study in response to the outcry from PETA and other animal protection groups when the agency tried to pull more than 200 chimpanzees out of retirement at the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico and send them back to laboratories. PETA, politicians, and other animal advocates stopped the move, and now, none of the chimpanzees at Alamorgordo, or any other NIH-owned chimpanzees not currently enrolled in experiments, can be used pending a further review by NIH.
This may well be the beginning of the end of chimpanzee experimentation. However, until these experiments are permanently banned, hundreds of chimpanzees are still in peril, which is why it remains vital that Congress pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would phase out the use of all chimpanzees in invasive experiments and permanently retire more than 600 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries, where they could live in peace at last. You can help by clicking here to urge your congressional representatives to pass this groundbreaking law and end the use of all great apes in experiments.
A new experiment has once again shown that rats in laboratories have empathy for one another. In the experiment, one rat was placed in a cage with another rat who was stuffed into a tiny tube from which he or she was unable to escape. The "free" rat worked frantically to get his or her distressed friend out, even when a tempting chocolate treat was offered as a distraction.
This is far from the first time that altruism has been seen in animals used for experimentation. In one notoriously cruel experiment, macaque monkeys were given food only if they pulled a chain that electrically shocked another monkey. Nearly all the monkeys preferred to go hungry, and one macaque starved himself for 12 days. Monkeys who had previously been shocked were even more reluctant to pull the chain and subject another individual to such punishment. In PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk's book The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights, she quotes astronomer Carl Sagan, who asks, "If the circumstances were reversed, and captive humans were offered the same deal by macaque scientists, would we do as well?"
Millions of kind, intelligent rats and other animals are poisoned, blinded, and killed every year in cruel experiments. You can show your empathy by clicking here to urge members of Congress to amend the Animal Welfare Act to include the protection of both rats and mice. Also, please only support companies and charities that don't test on animals.
Written by Monica Alexander
Written by Heather Faraid Drennan
After more than a year of campaigning by PETA and supporters—and a day after the release of a shocking PETA exposé—the University of Michigan (U-M) announced that it has ended the use of cats in its Survival Flight intubation training laboratory.
More than 100,000 people—including Michigan natives Iggy Pop and Lily Tomlin—called on U-M to replace crude and cruel live-animal laboratories with more humane and effective human simulators, which are already used for other U-M courses. The U-M student group Michigan Animal Rights Society led demonstrations in support of the effort, the student assembly passed a resolution urging the school to end the laboratories, and the student newspaper editorial board came out in favor of replacing animals with simulators. PETA supporters even jammed university circuit boards with phone calls to protest the Survival Flight animal laboratories.
U-M says that it still plans to harm and kill pigs to teach other skills in the Survival Flight training course, and PETA will continue to push the school to replace all animal use with simulators that are already available on campus.
Of course, this victory would not have been possible without the help of our supporters. Help us keep up the momentum by clicking here to urge St. Louis Children's Hospital to join U-M and nearly every other facility in the country by replacing the use of animals with simulators for intubation training.
He was a pretty, healthy, brown tabby cat when his guardians took him to a Michigan animal shelter in the hope of finding him a new home. But a heartless shelter director, a shady animal dealer, and a university hell-bent on abusing animals in crude and painful medical training exercises took away his chance at a happy ending.
Knowing full well that he would end up in a lab, the staff at Gratiot County Animal Shelter turned the cat over to notorious Class B animal dealer R&R Research, which in turn sold him to the University of Michigan (U-M). There, he was given the ID number 8269 and tormented in Survival Flight training labs for nurses by having hard plastic tubes repeatedly shoved down his delicate windpipe. A few days later, when U-M was done abusing 8269, they killed him. Another cat who was subjected to this cruel intubation laboratory, 8312, had been obtained from someone who gave her away "free to a good home." The cat was illegally acquired by R&R before being sold to U-M.
The stories of 8269 and the other cats killed by U-M were uncovered when PETA obtained records from Gratiot County and U-M. They reveal that U-M officials—including the director of the Survival Flight program—have shamelessly lied to the public by repeatedly stating in a newspaper opinion column, comments to the media, and official statements that the cats used in the archaic Survival Flight lab are always adopted out afterward.
While we were shocked to learn about U-M's illicit relationship with one of the most despicable animal dealers in the country and to discover that U-M has been blatantly lying about the fate of the cats, it really shouldn't have come as any surprise. U-M officials have been misleadingly claiming for a year that modern human-patient simulators can't replace the cat laboratories, even though these simulators are already used in the place of animals to teach intubation to doctors and nurses in other courses at U-M.
You can help prevent more cats from being betrayed like 8269 by clicking here to e-mail U-M officials and demanding that they replace the use of cats in these labs with the superior human-patient simulators that the school already owns.
As part of a four-part series on chimpanzees in laboratories published this week, Wired.com tells the story of a chimpanzee named Katrina who was taken from her mother as an infant to be infected with HIV and hepatitis B and C, even though chimpanzees' bodies don't react to these diseases in the same way as humans' do. Katrina was anesthetized almost 300 times by the age of 15 and was never given any painkillers after numerous invasive liver biopsies. This caged, lonely life, punctuated by fear and pain, so traumatized Katrina that she developed symptoms of severe post-traumatic stress disorder and has lost a third of her body weight.
Tragically, despite the fact that Katrina was supposedly retired in 2002, she is one of 14 chimpanzees who were sent to the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research eight years later for use in more invasive and painful infectious disease experiments. (Pressure from PETA and other groups successfully halted the transfer of 200 other chimpanzees.) Katrina's plight graphically illustrates how high the stakes are in the fight to ban experiments on great apes.
The Wired series and another story that ran this week in The New York Times come just weeks before the Institute of Medicine's scheduled December release of its report on the issue.
Last month, the editors at Scientific American came out in favor of banning experiments on chimpanzees. To continue to build momentum for the ban, please also post positive comments in response to the Wired and Times articles. Click here to ask your members of Congress to support the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, which would ban invasive experiments on all great apes and retire all federally owned chimpanzees currently in laboratories to sanctuaries.
If you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to an animal, please click here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
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