With the holiday shopping season just around the corner—and because the captive-reptile industry continues to market snakes inaccurately as “starter pets”—PETA is alerting parents to the dangers of buying these complex animals as presents with the following information:
Snakes have highly specialized needs—they require precise spectrum lighting, heat, humidity, and food as well as complex, enriching enclosures that are longer than their bodies in which they can bask, burrow, and explore.
Snakes naturally shun human contact, and being handled and kept in barren glass enclosures can leave them prone to illness and injury.
At least 75% of pet reptiles, including snakes, die within one year—the majority from stress related to captivity.
Most reptiles are captured and taken out of their native wild habitats and then sold by breeders en masse. A PETA investigation of California dealer Global Captive Breeders revealed small drawers filled with maggots, starving and dying snakes, and snakes’ rotting carcasses.
“In the wild, snakes warm themselves in the sun, burrow underground, swim and climb trees, and travel long distances—and they suffer immensely when they’re relegated to cramped glass tanks,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA is urging people to keep snakes off their wish lists.”
More information about PETA’s lawsuit is available here.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
The Union County Sportsmen’s Club—the roadside zoo at the center of a PETA campaign seeking cruelty charges over the outrageous neglect of Dillan the bear—must pay $1,700 to settle a litany of U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) citations, including those relating to Dillan’s rotted teeth, morbid obesity, and constant (and no doubt stress- and pain-related) rocking behavior clear to anyone who saw the bear, who was kept for years in a small, concrete-floored pen at the club.
The settlement specifically prohibits the club from ever again possessing bears or bobcats. If it fails to comply, it could ultimately lose its federal license to exhibit any animals. Meanwhile, PETA has provided authorities with documentation taken by concerned citizens at the Sportsmen’s Club showing an obese raccoon, a bird enclosure containing an excessive accumulation of feces, enclosures that lacked necessary perching for birds, and a bird with a severely overgrown beak.
“No bear will endure years of misery and wanton neglect at the Union County Sportsmen’s Club ever again,” says PETA Foundation Deputy General Counsel for Captive Animal Law Enforcement Brittany Peet. “The USDA has taken an important step in the right direction, and PETA will keep pushing for this bear’s abusers to be held accountable and stopped from hurting any other animal.”
Dillan was rescued from the club in January, following a vigorous PETA campaign. He had spent nearly every waking moment at the facility swaying and bobbing his head (a recognized way of trying to cope with physical pain and/or mental anguish)—a behavior that immediately stopped once he arrived at The Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado. Twelve of his teeth were extracted as a result of years of painful dental disease, and he was so obese that he weighed more than two and a half times that of an average male Asiatic black bear—but with appropriate care, he’s now enjoying life in a multi-acre, naturalistic habitat with three other Asiatic black bears.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
For nearly 60 years, the failing, archaic, disease-ridden Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC) at the University of Washington has tormented thousands of monkeys in painful experiments that have failed to improve human health. PETA is calling for the immediate closure of the facility—and you can help.
PETA Unfurls Massive Banner Calling For Shutdown of University of Washington’s Primate Center
November 12, 2020
PETA’s bold 30-foot-long banner urging the University of Washington to shut down its cruel primate center grabbed the attention of passing motorists from overpasses in Seattle. The banner featured the face of a monkey just like the tens of thousands who have been imprisoned and tormented in cruel experiments at the facility.
Footage Reveals ‘Dread, Despair, and Disease’ for Monkeys at Washington National Primate Research Center
November 12, 2020
Obtained via a public records request, never-before-seen footage released by PETA shows profoundly distressed monkeys pacing endlessly inside barren steel cages in dark and mostly underground rooms on the University of Washington’s campus and in a concrete building in downtown Seattle. Nearly 60 years of experiments on monkeys at the Washington National Primate Research Center on the UW campus have failed to produce any significant medical advances.
PETA Denounces Failing, Archaic, Disease-Ridden WaNPRC in Seattle Times Ad
November 7, 2020
In an arresting full-page ad in TheSeattle Times, PETA exposes failures at the University of Washington’s primate center: “Public records show that the primate center is deep in debt, is hemorrhaging scientists and other staff, and, by its own admission, is unable to keep the monkeys healthy … Monkeys have died from strangulation, starvation, dehydration, choking on their own vomit, bleeding to death, and being mauled by other stressed animals.”
PETA Files Complaint With Feds Alleging Violations of Federal Animal Welfare Laws, Conflicts of Interest
September 2, 2020
PETA has submitted a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture after uncovering evidence of Animal Welfare Act violations at the University of Washington’s primate center. It also alleges serious conflicts of interest on the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which is responsible for ensuring compliance with all animal protection laws in the institution’s laboratories. Read more.
PETA Exposes Incompetence and Negligence at the WaNPRC
June 25, 2020
In just the latest example of incompetence and negligence at the WaNPRC, a monkey imprisoned at the facility was somehow left locked in a trapping run. Two staff members noticed that the animal was missing but didn’t bother reporting the incident. The monkey went without food and water for as long as two days. Read more.
PETA Demands That the WaNPRC Be Transparent About COVID-19 in Workers and Monkeys
March 31, 2020
Humans aren’t the only primates who can be infected with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. That’s why PETA is calling on the WaNPRC to suspend all experiments and to provide documentation that the 1,200 monkeys housed there, as well as its staff, have not been exposed to or infected with the virus. Because the virus affects monkeys differently from humans, they are not good “models” for studying the human form of the disease—and if any of the monkeys are infected, future studies involving them would be compromised. Read more.
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What You Can Do
Text* SEATTLE to 73822 and call 206-543-5010 to urge the University of Washington to close down the WaNPRC and transfer the animals to sanctuaries.
*U.S. only. Message and data rates may apply. Periodic messaging. Text STOP to end or HELP for info. Full terms are at PETA.vg/txt.
Please see the following statement from PETA scientist Jeffrey Brown regarding Moderna’s announcement that clinical data show that its COVID-19 vaccine is 94.5% effective at preventing infection:
COVID-19 research is paving the way for safer, faster development of more effective vaccines. Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech didn’t wait for lengthy tests on monkeys and mice but did the majority of the animal tests at the same time that their vaccines were being tested on humans. The message for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is clear: Improve vaccine research by removing the requirement for lengthy animal trials. Decades have been wasted on misleading animal tests intended to develop vaccines to prevent AIDS, tuberculosis, Zika, and other deadly diseases, with nothing to show for it. It’s time to shift the focus from yesterday’s science and embrace the new model that Moderna and other companies have pioneered—and to take it a step further by replacing animal tests with more reliable and human-relevant animal-free ones.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.
