Kategorie: Animals

This morning, PETA filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) alleging violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratory where Elisabeth Murray conducts experiments in which monkeys are inflicted with permanent brain damage and then tormented in a variety of ways, including by being terrified with fake snakes and spiders.

The complaint was prompted by federal documents newly obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests revealing that monkeys in this NIH laboratory are subjected to a litany of procedures that cause pain and distress that is acute or chronic—including the following:

• In violation of federal law, monkeys are subjected to multiple invasive surgeries—including craniotomies in which sections of their skulls are carved out, a head post is implanted at the top of their skulls so that their heads can be held still, and a large hole is cut into their skulls so that experimenters can inject drugs into the brain.
• Monkeys are fitted with a metal or hard plastic collar and strapped into a restraint chair that keeps their head, arms, and/or legs immobilized. For some experiments, their arms are tied behind their backs while their heads are kept still via a head post. They are held in this manner for hours at a time as often as five days a week.
• Monkeys’ food and water consumption is severely restricted so that they will be motivated to “prompt[ly] respond” to the experimenters and “earn food or fluid … rewards.”
• Highly social rhesus macaques are caged alone, which frequently leads to self-harming behavior, as shown in a video obtained by PETA.

PETA’s complaint points out that in contravention of federal law, Murray failed to consider alternative approaches, such as human-based research methodologies; ensure that veterinarians would have sufficient authority to prioritize the welfare of the monkeys; and appropriately classify her experiments as causing monkeys unrelieved pain and distress.

“Three decades of creating brain-damaged, lonely, depressed, traumatized, and anxious monkeys—in apparent violation of the Animal Welfare Act—must come to an end,” says PETA research associate and neuroscientist Dr. Katherine Roe. “PETA is calling on the USDA to launch an investigation and hold NIH responsible for every single violation of federal law it finds in this grotesque laboratory.”

In February, PETA released video of Murray’s fright experiments on brain-damaged monkeys.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.

The post PETA Alleges Federal Law Violated in NIH Laboratory That Tortures, Inflicts Brain Damage on Monkeys appeared first on PETA.

Following several years of discussions with PETA and the presentation of evidence of extreme suffering caused when dogs are left chained or tied up and unattended, the Newport News City Council voted on Tuesday night to ban the practice, effective immediately. A dog is considered attended only if the guardian is outdoors and within sight of the animal.

The new animal welfare ordinance strengthens the city’s previous law passed in 2014 that allowed up to one hour of tethering—a time limit that animal services found extremely difficult to enforce, leaving residents’ concerns about chained dogs unaddressed.

“Thanks to the city council, dogs in Newport News will have legal protection from being left outdoors and at risk from heat prostration as temperatures soar this summer and storms come our way,” says PETA Senior Vice President Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA believes this new law will encourage residents to allow their dogs to live indoors and supervise them when they’re outdoors, just like any other vulnerable member of the family.”

Dogs chained outdoors can become tangled in their chains and die when they can’t reach their food, water, or shelter. Those left outdoors around the clock spend their entire lives in the same few square feet of space, forced to eat and sleep near or even in their own waste, and are deprived of the social interaction that they crave as pack animals. Dogs left outside can suffer from heatstroke in the summer and from frostbite and exposure in the winter. PETA fieldworkers, who work year-round to help neglected “backyard dogs,” regularly find chained dogs with collars embedded in their necks.

PETA urges anyone who sees a dog left outside unattended in the city to call Newport News Animal Services at 757-595-PETS (7387) or PETA at 757-622-PETA (7382).

Newport News joins Hampton, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Suffolk in banning unattended tethering 24/7. Across Virginia as of July 1, it will be illegal to leave dogs tethered outside when temperatures dip below 32 degrees or soar above 85 degrees and during winter storms, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, hurricanes, and tropical storms.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.

The post Victory for Dogs: Unattended Tethering Now Illegal in Newport News appeared first on PETA.

Today, after a two-year open records fight followed by a lawsuit, PETA has released video footage obtained from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) showing monkeys filmed by experimenters at four national primate research centers, including the Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC) at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. The 40 hours of footage that UMass released in a legal settlement show deeply distressed monkeys housed in small metal cages, pacing endlessly, tearing out their hair, and even poking their thumbs into their own eye sockets.

In 2017, PETA filed a Freedom of Information records request to obtain videos related to a study overseen by UMass experimenter Melinda Novak as part of a project titled “Self-Injurious Behavior and Primate Well-Being,” for which she received more than $2.1 million in taxpayer funds. The public university denied the request and fought to keep the tapes from seeing the light of day, so PETA filed a lawsuit. Two years later, during the course of litigation and after PETA subpoenaed Novak’s records and tried to set a date to depose her under oath, UMass agreed to settle the case and hand over copies of all the videos, with images of the experimenters redacted.

Novak’s earlier work, which was carried out under now-notorious monkey experimenter Harry Harlow, included maternal deprivation experiments on monkeys in which infants were taken from their mothers and raised in isolation or given inanimate “surrogate mothers,” often made of metal. In the late 1980s, she shifted her focus to studying self-injurious behavior in laboratory-confined macaques, looking at hair-pulling and self-biting, hair loss (alopecia), and stereotypic movements, such as pacing and rocking, all symptoms of extreme psychological distress. Starting in 1990, she received more than $10 million in taxpayer funds to study how and why monkeys mutilate themselves in laboratories. Following more than 30 years of conducting these hideous experiments, she suddenly retired after PETA’s lawsuit was filed.

Although the purported point of the studies was to show how monkeys suffer simply by being caged in laboratories, with an eye to preventing this trauma—and even though Novak published dozens of journal articles on her research—not one improvement to help monkeys used for experimentation has been required since the 1985 amendments to the federal Animal Welfare Act, which were the result of PETA video exposés of the suffering of monkeys in laboratories.

“Three decades of studying the psychological, emotional, and physical trauma of monkeys caged for experiments—yet not one thing has been done to help these animals,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “Experimenters at federally funded national primate research centers must stop creating trauma simply to study it, and the use of monkeys must end now.”

The 40 hours of footage now in PETA’s possession were filmed by experimenters at UMass and at four other national primate research centers—the SNPRC, the Oregon National Primate Research Center, the Washington National Primate Research Center, and the now-shuttered New England National Primate Research Center—and sent to Novak for analysis.

Texas Biomed’s long history of negligence, mistreatment, and incompetence has resulted in numerous citations for violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act. According to federal inspection reports posted earlier this year, a female baboon was strangled when a cable on the door to her cage became loose, the arm of a juvenile baboon was fractured after it became stuck in a fence, a female macaque’s finger had to be amputated after it became caught in a cage mechanism, and a marmoset escaped from a cage and entered another, fatally injuring another marmoset. Earlier reports document that there were bloodied, injured, burned, emaciated, hypothermic, and asphyxiated monkeys—and the facility was even issued a fine in 2011.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.

The post PETA Lawsuit Nets Video Footage Primate Experimenter Fought to Hide appeared first on PETA.

The post PETA Exposes SeaWorld’s Sexual Assault on Animals appeared first on PETA.

The post Film and Television appeared first on PETA.