Kategorie: Animals

News that a 23-year-old employee died on June 13 after being mauled by a tiger at a roadside zoo in Peribán, Michoacán, in western Mexico is a tragic reminder of the risks these tourists traps pose to animals and the public—and why they should be avoided.

Video footage shows the employee reaching through a chain-link fence to pet a Bengal tiger at feeding time, and as he strokes the animal’s neck, the tiger sinks his teeth into the employee’s hand and pulls him toward the fence. First responders rushed him to a hospital after the tiger mauling, but he apparently refused to let doctors amputate his mangled hand. As his condition deteriorated, he died of a massive heart attack.

A Life of Neglect

Confined to small, filthy enclosures and denied the space, diverse environment, and freedom they need to thrive, animals imprisoned at roadside zoos are often deprived of adequate food, water, shelter, and veterinary care. Relentless frustration, loneliness, and abuse from the people who are supposed to care for them drive many of the animals insane.

Using big cats and their cubs, primates, and other animals as photo props, the operators of these cruel attractions lure in visitors who may not be aware of how the animals suffer. Many volunteers and workers at such facilities have been mauled.

While baby animals attract customers, those who have grown too big to control or are considered too old are sent away—often to be used as breeders in order to continue the cycle of abuse—or relegated to dingy cages, where they could languish for more than 20 years.

Help Tigers and Other Animals Trapped at Roadside Zoos

Roadside zoos—which sometimes advertise themselves as sanctuaries—petting zoos, and traveling zoos are only in business because people pay to visit them. Please don’t contribute to animals’ suffering. Instead, learn about animals by watching documentaries or observing them in their own habitats.

Help Animals in Roadside Zoos

The post VIDEO: Fatal Tiger Mauling Is a Reminder to Skip Roadside Zoos appeared first on PETA.

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Maryland state Sen. Benjamin F. Kramer sent letters this week to Johns Hopkins University (JHU), the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (MD DNR), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) calling on them to ensure that JHU experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s deadly brain tests on owls permanently end and to sanction him for repeatedly violating state law.

“[T]hese experiments on owls have been a source of great public concern and appear to render no concrete translatability to human health,” writes Kramer. “I find it astounding that JHU, which receives millions of taxpayer dollars, on an annual basis, has so flagrantly disregarded Maryland State Law and allowed the owls to be killed.”

“Continuing to give Shreesh Mysore millions of taxpayer dollars to torture owls in tests while he violates laws left and right is proof of a culture of corruption in science,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “We applaud Sen. Kramer for holding federal, state, and university officials accountable and for demanding an end to Mysore’s barbaric owl experiments.”

Kramer reminds the agencies that from 2015 to 2018, Mysore failed to obtain mandatory permits to possess barn owls legally for use in his experiments. He subsequently obtained a permit, but last month—after PETA alerted the MD DNR that Mysore’s experiments involve killing owls, which also violates Maryland state law—the agency revoked his permit and issued him a new one expressly prohibiting him from killing the owls. This should effectively end the experiments, as they require mutilating and killing the birds.

Mysore’s tests—conducted purportedly to study human attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, despite the hearing and vision differences between the species—involve cutting into barn owls’ skulls, implanting electrodes in their brains, forcing the birds into cramped plastic tubes or jackets, clamping their eyes open, and bombarding them with sounds and lights for up to 12 hours. Mysore has received more than $1.9 million in taxpayer funds for these tests despite their meager 5% “approximate potential to translate” to human health.

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 investigative news gathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

The post Maryland State Senator Calls For Sanctions and an End to Owl Experiments at JHU appeared first on PETA.

Tiger King villain and Myrtle Beach Safari operator Bhagavan “Doc” Antle has been charged with two felony counts of wildlife trafficking under Virginia law. Antle, who is already facing felony wildlife-trafficking and cruelty-to-animals charges related to trafficking lion cubs from the now-defunct Wilson’s Wild Animal Park, also has a detention hearing this afternoon related to his pending federal charges for money laundering. Below, please find a statement from PETA Foundation Deputy General Counsel for Captive Animal Law Enforcement Brittany Peet:

Since this wildlife exploiter couldn’t put himself in the animals’ place, he ought to end up where he put them: behind bars. As felony charges mount, PETA is calling on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to stop granting Antle special treatment and shut down the wildlife-handling events that have been at the root of his alleged crimes, caused egregious suffering to animals, and lined his sleazy pockets.

More details about Antle’s exploitation of animals are available here.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

The post PETA Statement: ‘Doc’ Antle Hit With New Felony Counts of Wildlife Trafficking appeared first on PETA.

PETA is calling on its millions of supporters to flood EGYPTAIR Cargo phone lines to urge it to stop shipping monkeys to their deaths in laboratories, following reports that a shipment of macaques from Cambodia arrived via the airline at John F. Kennedy (JFK) International Airport this morning.

In just three months, the airline has reportedly flown more than 4,000 monkeys into JFK, posing a grave, potentially fatal public health risk and causing immense suffering to the monkeys, who were either captured in nature or bred on disease-ridden farms.

Monkeys who survive these conditions are packed into small wooden crates and locked inside EGYPTAIR’s cargo holds on the first part of their grueling journey to their final destination: laboratories in which they’ll be mutilated and killed in experiments that rarely translate to cures or treatments for humans.

“Cramming monkeys into dark cargo holds terrorizes these intelligent animals and risks deadly outbreaks of disease,” says PETA primate scientist Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel. “PETA is calling on EGYPTAIR to follow the example set by its competitors and stop doing favors for the animal experimentation industry.”

PETA notes that nearly every major airline in the world has stopped transporting monkeys to laboratories and that Kenya Airways committed to ending the practice earlier this year following an appeal from the group. The monkeys whose crates spilled out onto a Pennsylvania highway as a result of a truck crash in January were flown on one of its planes that had landed in JFK earlier that day.

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.

The post Thousands of Lab-Bound Monkeys Shipped to JFK Airport; PETA Rallies Supporters to Object appeared first on PETA.