PETA

By Kathy Guillermo

In our work to replace the use of animals for experimentation with superior non-animal methods, we at PETA often say, “If what happens to animals inside a laboratory happened outside the lab, it would be a crime.”

In July, a grand jury agreed with us. Fourteen felony cruelty-to-animals indictments were returned against four former employees of Professional Laboratory and Research Services (PLRS) in North Carolina, which was investigated and exposed by PETA last year. Indictments and charges against those who abuse animals—wherever the cruelty occurs—should happen more often.

For decades, PLRS was hired by big pharmaceutical companies to test the pesticides in flea and tick products on dogs, cats and rabbits. Last year, a PETA investigator worked undercover in the facility and caught these employees on video kicking, throwing and dragging dogs; hoisting rabbits by their ears and puppies by their throats; violently slamming cats into cages; and screaming obscenities and death wishes at terrified animals. One worker can be seen on video trying to rip out a cat’s claws by violently pulling the animal from the chain link fence that the cat clung to.

The indictments follow citations by federal officials for serious violations of animal welfare laws, the laboratory’s closure and the surrender of nearly 200 dogs and more than 50 cats just a week after we released our findings. Laboratory staff reportedly killed all the rabbits, but the dogs and cats have been placed in homes.

I know one of the rescued dogs, a small terrier-hound who looks a little like the beleaguered but hopeful pup in the animated version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” She was known only by the number tattooed in her ear. Bone-thin, terrified and infested with worms, she was pulled from her cage and began a long journey that ended in the home of one of my colleagues.

At first Libby, as she was named, cowered in fear and crawled on her belly rather than standing upright and risk being noticed. I visited her recently. She is a joyful little dog today who loves her person, her canine friends and her happy life. Imprisonment in a laboratory has been replaced by long walks in the mountains, where she darts up and down the trails, her tail wagging.

Some abuse in laboratories has the approval of oversight committees and is funded by the federal government with our tax dollars. They don’t call it abuse of course—it’s “research” when someone gets paid to collect data on suffering animals. But forcing mice to fight with each other until they’re bloody, keeping monkeys constantly thirsty to coerce them to cooperate in brain experiments, torching sheep over two-thirds of their bodies, force-feeding chemicals to dogs, electrically shocking the sensitive feet of rats, cutting off the tops of cats’ skull to insert electrodes in their brains—all this is legal.

Many state anti-cruelty laws exempt experiments on animals. Wisconsin, where the mice-fighting experiments occurred and were in apparent violation of anti-animal fighting laws, just passed such an exemption.

As Libby shows, the animals are the same whether they’re inside a laboratory or outside it. They feel pain when they’re hurt. They want their own lives, even if some humans think these lives are of no value. Thank goodness the grand jury in North Carolina saw the appalling treatment of animals for what it was and refused to give the laboratory a free pass. Let’s hope it’s a trend.

Kathy Guillermo is vice president of Laboratory Investigations for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

By Justin Goodman

An experimenter at the University of California–Los Angeles who addicts monkeys to methamphetamines, kills them and dissects their brains recently defended the practice of tormenting animals in laboratories by saying that it was a “fact of science.” Animal experimentation is indeed a “fact” in the sense that it takes place, but its mere existence is not a sound ethical defense, with all its accompanying violence and death. This sort of argument implies that the way we conduct science—and the way we treat animals—is constant, unchangeable and not up for debate. Fortunately, this is not how science (or society) actually works. 

Other “facts of science” that history ultimately deemed atrocities include experiments on unconsenting humans―among them, the poor, prisoners, the developmentally disabled, Jews and African-Americans. J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology,” developed life-saving treatments for difficult pregnancies that are still in use today by conducting surgeries on the genitalia of unanesthetized female slaves he “rented” from local plantations.

A century later, one government researcher defended his involvement in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments by stating that because the people being deprived of medical treatment were poor black sharecroppers, “The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical materials, not sick people.” Back then, using black men and women against their will in experiments was as much a “fact of science” as slavery and racial segregation were a “fact of life.” Both then and now this abhorrent cruelty and racism was indefensible.

Those who support animal experimentation—not unlike the people who conducted the unethical experiments mentioned above—are quick to acknowledge the similarities between species in order to justify the use of animals as proxies for humans, but they are even quicker to minimize and disregard the obvious moral implications because it is not in their personal, political or financial interests to do so. Self-reflection and scientific inquiry can lead to conclusions that are uncomfortable and inconvenient, but society will never progress if people choose to assimilate only the ideas that reinforce their personal biases and protect their own interests.

Evolutionary theory and scientific evidence tell us that animals―from mice to monkeys―possess all the same characteristics that make it repugnant to experiment on humans without their consent. Animals who are locked in laboratories, just like the dogs and cats with whom we share our homes, have their own lives and preferences and experience pain, suffering and pleasure. They express empathy when other animals are in distress, and they exhibit altruism, putting themselves in harm’s way rather than allowing a friend or relative to suffer.  They are sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. Their lives matter to them and should matter to us too. 

Yet, the law allows rats, rabbits, cats, dogs, pigs, monkeys and other animals to be burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated, starved, paralyzed, cut open and addicted to drugs as well as have their brains damaged. What happens to animals in laboratories would be considered criminal cruelty to animals if it occurred elsewhere. No experiment―no matter how painful or trivial―is prohibited, and painkillers are not required.

Even when viable alternatives to animals are available, the law does not require that these alternatives be used, and very often they aren’t. For example, faculty at the University of Michigan and the Medical University of South Carolina—which oddly gives out an annual award for surgical excellence named after the infamous Dr. Sims mentioned above—continue to cut holes into pigs’ throats and chests in a crude and deadly medical training exercise, even though the schools use sophisticated humanlike simulators to teach the same skills elsewhere on their campuses. 

Animals aren’t chosen to be used in experiments because they are inferior to humans in any morally relevant way or because it’s good science. They are chosen because—like slaves, prisoners and the poor—they are more vulnerable, and it has been unjustly decided that their pain is less important than ours.

History will look back on the “fact” of humans’ violent exploitation of animals in laboratories and see it for precisely what it is—a grave moral misstep.

Justin Goodman is associate director of Laboratory Investigations for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as well as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Marymount University in Arlington, Va. He can be reached c/o PETA, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

By Heather Moore

Attention “drag” queens: The Great American Smokeout is November 18. Not only will butting out cigarettes help save your life, it will also help stop animal suffering. While everyone knows that smoking is harmful to humans, contributing to cancer, coronary heart disease and other life-threatening illnesses, relatively few people realize that animals are also dying because of cigarettes. Not only can our beloved animal companions develop cancer from secondhand smoke, just as humans can, monkeys, mice, rats and other animals are cruelly killed in irrelevant laboratory experiments funded by big tobacco companies and government agencies.

If you care about animals, you can do something to stop these deadly experiments: Stop smoking.

Studies published this year show that animals are still being used to test the “safety” of cigarette ingredients—and to determine whether harmful substances are actually, um, harmful—even though non-animal test methods are readily available. For example, in order to test the safety of a compound that’s used to keep tobacco moist, experimenters with Philip Morris stuffed more than 500 rats into tiny canisters and forced tobacco smoke into their noses six hours a day for 90 consecutive days. The rats were then killed and dissected.

Experimenters funded by R.J. Reynolds spread concentrated cigarette smoke particles on more than 800 rats’ skin three times a week for more than four months so that they would develop skin tumors. These rats were also then killed and cut apart.

Researchers have also laced animals’ food with tobacco in order to study the effects of ingesting smokeless tobacco. Not surprisingly, the animals suffered devastating health problems, including damaged eyes, skin and internal organs; weight loss; and genital swelling.

We already know that pregnant women who smoke—or are exposed to smoke—endanger their unborn babies, but that didn’t stop experimenters at the University of California–Davis from locking eight pregnant rhesus monkeys into chambers and exposing them to smoke for six hours a day, five days a week during the last two months of the monkeys’ pregnancies. The experimenters continued to pump cigarette smoke into the enclosures for two months after the babies were born. When the babies were 2 1/2 months old, they were taken from their mothers, killed and dissected so that experimenters could see how the smoke had affected their arteries.

Versions of these inhumane and unnecessary experiments have been conducted before. In previous years, researchers exposed pregnant monkeys to nicotine to observe its detrimental effects on their fetuses, made mice and rats breathe cigarette smoke to test the effects of adding high-fructose corn syrup to cigarettes as a flavoring agent, cut live dogs’ chests open to study how cigarette smoke causes airway irritation and much more.

None of these cruel experiments is required by U.S. law—American Spirit cigarettes are not tested on animals—and they wouldn’t even be legal if conducted in Belgium, Germany or the U.K., where smoking experiments on animals have been banned.

PETA has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban smoking experiments on animals in America as well. Non-animal test methods are readily available and are more relevant to humans; in fact, all the tobacco product tests required in Canada are non-animal tests. Animals don’t make good models for humans. Different animals have different reactions to toxins, and animals in laboratories aren’t exposed to nicotine in the same manner, or time frame, as humans. Besides, we already know from clinical research—and from basic common sense—that nicotine is bad for us.

The next time you’re “dying for a cigarette,” please remember that animals are dying too. They’re dying for you to quit smoking.

Heather Moore is a research specialist for the PETA Foundation, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

By Kathy Guillermo

Most words describing life for animals in laboratories are inadequate. They can’t begin to convey the actual experience. So try this: Imagine you’re Jamie Lee Curtis in the 1978 film Halloween or any of the victims in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series or one of the humans in Night of the Living Dead. Think of the fright you know just by vicariously feeling what it would be like if you were unable to escape a zombie or a crazed man with a knife. Think of Ms. Curtis’s panicked character Laurie Strode banging on the neighbor’s door, hoping for rescue, as her murderous brother comes closer and closer.

Now imagine that it’s real.

That’s everyday life for animals in laboratories: the heart-pounding terror of being trapped, unable to escape, as someone with a weapon—a scalpel or electric-shock device or a bottle of chemicals—approaches. Studies show that animals’ hearts race in fear when a laboratory worker simply enters the room.

There’s no happy ending for animals. They can’t leave the theater or sound stage and go home. The man or woman approaching means death—murder for the animals, the end of life—in virtually every case.

A rare exception occurred last month following the release of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA) undercover investigation of a North Carolina laboratory called Professional Laboratory and Research Services (PLRS). PLRS was paid by large pharmaceutical companies to test flea, tick and companion-animal products on dogs and cats. For these animals, this is bad enough. It means being doused with or force-fed chemicals that will likely cause sickness or death.

But PETA’s investigator documented the kind of treatment that decent people hope never occurs in laboratories. Look at the video evidence at PETA.org. Laboratory workers scream death wishes and curses at cowering dogs; drag them, kick them and lift them by their ears; fling cats into cages, calling them “motherf—ers”; and deny veterinary care to dogs who have rotten teeth and whose legs are covered with sores.

PETA’s 70-page complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture led to the laboratory’s closure just a week later. Nearly 200 dogs and more than 50 cats have been gently and lovingly taken in by animal shelters. Animals, some of whom were imprisoned at PLRS for years, who’ve never walked on grass or up steps and who’ve never known affection—except what PETA’s investigator could give them—will go to good homes.

This is a wonderful ending to a tragic case. But I also think of all the dogs and cats who died at PLRS in the 20 years before PETA got there. And I think of all the animals—of all species—who live in terror, with no escape, and eventually die in the more than 1,100 animal laboratories in the U.S.

It’s wrong, no matter what the goal is, to do this to other beings. We wouldn’t do it to children, who are also defenseless. We wouldn’t do it other adult humans. We should not do it to animals. Experiments on animals can never be justified in a progressive and decent society like ours. PLRS, bad as it was, is not the only animal laboratory that should go out of business. The doors of every place where animals are treated as if their lives are of no consequence—and as if their suffering is less important than ours—should close forever.

Kathy Guillermo is the vice president of Laboratory Investigations for PETA and the author of Monkey Business: The Disturbing Case That Launched the Animal Rights Movement. She can be reached c/o PETA at 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

By Ingrid E. Newkirk

New Mexico’s Governor Richardson met with National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials recently in a last-ditch effort to stop NIH from moving 202 “retired” chimpanzees out of Holloman Air Force base and back into invasive experiments. NIH is moving swiftly to transfer the chimpanzees into facilities so substandard that caging conditions within them violate not only everything that we have come to know about what chimpanzees require but also federal law itself. Some of the animals are 60 years old; some are left over from the space program. Gov. Richardson’s visit came on the heels of petitions and pleas by everyone from physicians, veterinarians and primatologists to actors such as Gene Hackman, all of which have been ignored.

It was only a week earlier that Time magazine’s cover story asked the question, “What’s on animals’ minds?” Fifteen years before, as Dr. Jane Goodall mulled over the complex relationships within chimpanzee families, Time had asked, “Do animals think?” Now the question is “What do animals think?” In the case of chimpanzees, who have been taught to use sign boards and even American Sign Language to communicate with their human captors, they think a lot. 

The more pressing question is now “What is NIH thinking?” And the answer isn’t befitting our nation’s level of awareness about animals and its commitment to their protection.

In 2001, the U.S. Congress recognized that chimpanzees should be retired from experimentation. ”Retirement” has not meant a beachfront condo or a return to the Gombe. Charities have managed to wrest away some chimpanzees, rehabilitate them from a life that, in some cases, consisted of 34 years on a concrete bench in a tiny cell or two decades in a steel cage barely any bigger than the animal’s body, and put them in group care. 

In many cases, “retirement” has meant a continuation of solitary confinement but no more invasive and painful procedures. Imbued with active, intelligent minds, naturally inclined to complex social relationships, as capable of falling in love and carefully raising their children as we are, they sit and wait, alone, with not even a blanket or an orange to keep them company. It is cruel and unusual punishment for a thinking being, but it is still far better than also being cut apart and sewn back up every so often, the fate that now awaits them again if NIH does not stop this wretched plan.

NIH has already moved 15 of the “retired” chimpanzees to the Southwest Foundation, a Texas facility that has failed to meet federal minimum standards for the care of animals. Federal minimum standards for chimpanzees, by the way, require no more than enough room in which to stand, sit and turn around―for life. Charles River Laboratories, which operates the Alamogordo Primate Facility, another dungeon-like laboratory complex as notoriously inhumane as Devil’s Island, plans to start experimenting on these and the other chimpanzees soon. 

Carl Sagan once wondered if those who experiment on nonhuman primates would fare as well as their subjects if the tables were turned. At first, he thought they would. But in one experiment, in which monkeys were only permitted to eat if they pulled a lever that administered an electric shock to another monkey, the monkeys chose to abstain from food for up to 14 days, even if they didn’t know the monkey being shocked. Sagan had to wonder how many human beings in the same situation would be so selfless.

If this administration is to be seen as remotely humane, President Obama must act quickly to stop the NIH officials who have chosen to ignore all that we have learned over the years about how indistinguishable chimpanzees are from us in any important way, such as the ability to feel pain and fear, love and joy, and the desire to live with others of one’s own kind. The chimpanzees being moved out of Holloman are not a testament to our society’s quest for understanding and compassion but rather a testament to its ability to betray, for a few bucks, those who depend on us for mercy.

Ingrid E. Newkirk is the president and founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org. Her latest book is The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights.

A report issued last month by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., blasts 100 “questionable,” “mismanaged” and “poorly planned” stimulus-funded projects, including an especially pointless and cruel experiment that the report aptly calls “Monkeys Getting High for Science.” The study in question is being conducted at the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, a Winston Salem, N.C.–based facility that was awarded $71,623 in stimulus funds to feed cocaine to monkeys.

“I think all of [the projects] are waste,” McCain told ABC News. “[S]ome are more egregious than others but all of them are terrible.”

Hooking monkeys on coke definitely falls into the “more egregious” category. Unfortunately, this study is just a drop in the proverbial crack pipe. Wasteful and cruel addiction studies on animals are currently being conducted all over the country—and most are simply slight variations on experiments that have been conducted for years. Often the “results” have been known for years as well.

For example, it has already been well established that smoking harms developing human fetuses. But that hasn’t stopped the federal government from funneling more than $10 million to Eliot Spindel of the Oregon National Primate Research Center. Spindel impregnates monkeys and then continuously injects them with nicotine to cause damage to their unborn babies’ lungs. The preterm babies are then cut from their mothers’ bodies and killed so that their organs can be cut out and dissected.

Other experiments on animals could easily be conducted on willing human volunteers.

At Yale University, experimenter Marina Picciotto has squandered nearly $10 million in taxpayer money from the National Institutes of Health for nicotine, amphetamine and cocaine addiction experiments on monkeys, mice and rats. The stated goal of one such experiment was to determine how long one should wait after ingesting nicotine before brain imaging is done.

But rather than using actual human smokers who were enrolled in a clinical study, Picciotto isolated monkeys in cages and fed them nicotine-laced Kool-Aid for eight weeks. One monkey received a dose of nicotine each day that was equal to the amount of nicotine found in 17 packs of cigarettes (far more than even chain-smoking humans consume), and the monkeys had to suffer through the distress and discomfort of nicotine withdrawal.

Some addiction experiments appear to be almost sadistically pointless. At Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital, Jack Bergman has conducted federally funded experiments on squirrel monkeys in which they were isolated in steel cages, addicted to methamphetamines and cocaine, strapped in restraint chairs and given electric shocks.

Bergman now wants to spend another $1.75 million of public money from NASA to blast squirrel monkeys with radiation and then cage them for the rest of their lives to see how it damages their brains and bodies—even though four decades of government-funded radiation experiments on primates have not produced any results that are relevant to humans. A NASA space station engineer who resigned in protest over the experiment says she believes that the agency’s resources would be better spent devising ways to prevent radiation from entering spaceships rather than trying to figure out what to do after it does.

While it is always unethical to confine, poison, mutilate and kill animals for experimentation, it is especially egregious that experimenters are trying to use animals to model addiction, which is in large part caused by social, psychological and even economic factors. Studies on animals can’t resolve these issues.

Furthermore, vast fundamental biological differences between humans and other animals make the results of such experiments difficult if not impossible to extrapolate to humans. Data from mice, rats and monkeys who are trapped in a laboratory and forced into an unnatural and involuntary addiction are of no relevance to humans suffering from drug addictions. Federal tax dollars would be much better spent funding cash-strapped addiction treatment centers and studying drug addictions in humans in a clinical setting rather than torturing animals.

 Alisa Mullins is a research specialist for The PETA Foundation, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.StopAnimalTests.com.

By Jessica Sandler and Kate Willett, Ph.D.

If anyone out there is still wondering about the superiority of alternatives to animal tests, look no further than what is happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico. In its efforts to assist the devastated region, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is saving time, money and the lives of countless animals—those suffering in laboratories—by using efficient and effective non-animal methods to study the endocrine effects of chemical dispersants that could be used to clean up the oil gusher.

In fact, using non-animal testing methods is the only way that the EPA can get information about these chemicals in a short period of time—a few weeks as opposed to years. Without such sophisticated methods, the EPA would have to rely on crude and cruel animal toxicity tests that date back to the 1930s, and we would be waiting years to know anything at all about these chemicals. Considering the dire conditions of the region, waiting years for an answer is simply not an option. 

The modern in vitro tests that the EPA has on hand to study the endocrine effects of eight oil spill dispersants are rapid and automated, in contrast to what the EPA calls “time consuming and expensive” animal tests. Testing one chemical on animals can cost millions, versus the EPA’s estimated $20,000 using in vitro testing. And while cost considerations are important, turn-around time is even more essential as ecosystems totter on the brink of disaster. The EPA states that, on average, it would take a researcher “eight hours a day, five days a week, for 12 years” to conduct these studies using traditional animal tests. The computer-driven in vitro tests deliver results in three days. The EPA has already completed the first round of toxicity testing on these dispersants.

The situation in the Gulf highlights the necessity of toxicology testing reform. Most of the tests used in standard chemical screening today were developed in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. They are heavily reliant on animals, are slow and costly and have yielded inaccurate information about the effects of chemicals on humans. And they have allowed dangerous chemicals such as benzene and arsenic to enter and remain on the market—even after millions of animals have been killed in decades of testing. 

Our current system is overloaded and incapable of accurately screening the tens of thousands of chemicals reportedly in the environment already, with more entering every day. Scientists and government agencies are now recognizing that “it is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through new chemicals in the blind way that we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health” (Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel laureate in medicine).

Indeed, Congress and the EPA are now looking to overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act to bring chemical regulation into the 21^st century. The EPA and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) are among the scientific organizations calling for toxicity testing methods that are human-relevant, faster and cheaper and that use fewer or no animals.

In its 2007 report, the NAS confirmed that scientific advances can “transform toxicity testing from a system based on whole-animal testing to one founded primarily on in vitro (non-animal) methods.” Such an approach will improve efficiency, speed and prediction for humans while cutting costs and reducing animal suffering. As it should, the newly introduced legislation supports the continued development and implementation of this shift toward non-animal methodologies.

As the case in the Gulf demonstrates, non-animal testing is the stuff of science—not “science fiction” as critics often contend—and it is surely the future of ensuring chemical safety.

Jessica Sandler, director of PETA’s regulatory testing division, is a former government safety and health official. Dr. Kate Willett is PETA’s science policy adviser. They can be reached c/o PETA at 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

By Jessica Sandler and Kate Willett, Ph.D.

Who would you save—your child or your dog? This is the phony choice lobbed at those of us who advocate for the replacement of animal tests with non-animal testing methods. Fortunately, you don’t have to choose.

Under pressure from citizens concerned about exposure to hazardous chemicals, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now considering overhauling toxic-chemical regulations. In more than a decade—and despite killing many millions of animals in chemical toxicity tests—the EPA has failed abysmally to safeguard the public by pulling dangerous substances off the market. The examples are legion and well documented.

For instance, the link between benzene—a gasoline component and solvent widely used in the preparation of drugs and plastics—and human leukemia was established as early as 1928, yet dozens of subsequent animal studies failed to replicate benzene’s cancer-causing effects. Only during the late 1980s were researchers finally able to induce cancer in animals by overdosing them with benzene—and our government is still testing benzene on animals.

Exposure to arsenic has been implicated in increased cancer risk for nearly 150 years. Smelter workers exposed to arsenic in the air are at higher risk for developing lung cancer, and population studies show that arsenic in drinking water can also cause cancer. Yet regulation was delayed for decades while thousands of animals were killed in experiments that attempted to reproduce the effects already seen in humans. Reviews published as late as 1977 reported that animal experiments had failed to produce evidence supporting a link between arsenic exposure and increased cancer risk. It was not until the late 1980s that researchers finally succeeded in reproducing the cancer-causing effects of arsenic in animals.

Updating our chemical management laws is important for protecting human health and the environment. But in order to be effective, we must acknowledge that the current way of testing chemicals for toxic effects uses methods that are decades old, condemns thousands of animals per chemical and provides information that is not very useful for regulating chemicals. Much has happened in the fields of biology and toxicology in the past few decades, and it is imperative that we use all of our current understanding and technology to test chemicals. In addition to providing more relevant and useful information, the modern methods also use many fewer animals—perhaps even no animals. 

With tens of thousands of chemicals on the market and more entering it every day, it’s now widely recognized, even by regulators, that “it is simply not possible with all the animals in the world to go through chemicals in the blind way we have at the present time, and reach credible conclusions about the hazards to human health” (Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel laureate in medicine).

The National Academy of Sciences, the government’s own scientific arm, released a report in 2007 confirming that scientific advances can “transform toxicity testing from a system based on whole-animal testing to one founded primarily on in vitro [non-animal] methods.” Such an approach will improve efficiency, speed and prediction for humans while cutting costs and reducing animal suffering. Indeed, high-tech methods are the only way thousands of chemicals can be tested.

Any update of the laws regulating toxic chemicals must include measures to ensure that the most modern testing methods are used. It is critical that the science underlying chemical safety assessments be updated from the crude animal tests developed around the time of World War I to the 21st century technology that is now available. Without this shift in science, chemical management reform of the kind being proposed by the EPA and others is logistically impossible.

So, your child or your dog? We now can—and should—save both.

Jessica Sandler, director of PETA’s regulatory testing division, is a former government safety and health official. Dr. Kate Willett is PETA’s science policy adviser. They can be reached c/o PETA at 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

In the last few years-ever since the passage of the chilling Animal Enterprises Terrorism Act and the implementation of an earlier incarnation of the law-the free speech rights of some animal activists have been trampled in McCarthy-like fashion. People who spoke at public events about the torment that animals are forced to endure in laboratories, sent faxes in protest, ran an informational Web site and organized and attended protests on public property-activities associated with constitutionally protected free speech-found themselves facing prosecution as “terrorists.”

This should give all Americans pause. People who engage in nonviolent protests and civil disobedience are sitting in jail cells, stigmatized by one of the most politically charged and discrediting labels of our time, while people who wake up every morning and go to jobs in which they torment and kill animals in laboratories continue to enjoy their freedom, paychecks, social lives and families.

As a case in point, PETA just released the findings of an eight-month undercover investigation at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Wearing a hidden camera, our investigator documented circumstances that violate our moral sensibilities about how we ought to treat animals and represent what we believe are dozens of violations of federal laws and guidelines governing the treatment of dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, mice, rats and pigs.

Tiny mice with grotesque tumors were left to suffer from cancers that had nearly grown bigger than their bodies. Laboratory workers couldn’t even manage to make sure that all mice had water, and one worker admitted that mice in the laboratory die of dehydration “all the time.”

Monkeys were kept deprived of water so that they would cooperate during experiments in exchange for a sip. Imagine these animals’ lives: They had holes drilled into their skulls and metal hardware attached to their heads. They live in tiny cages, all alone, without even the touch and comfort of a companion. They are so emotionally and physically traumatized that they constantly whirl or rock back and forth. And on top of all this, they are always thirsty-so thirsty they’ll do almost anything for a few drops of water.

Our investigation also revealed that shelters near Salt Lake City sell dogs and cats to this university as though they were disposable laboratory equipment. Our investigator’s video footage shows dogs at the shelter wagging their tails as lab techs approach their cages to assess whether they’d be good “subjects,” unaware of the invasive, painful tests that are about to be conducted on them. This is a betrayal of these vulnerable animals and also of the public, which counts on animal shelters to be havens for homeless animals.

So think about it. People who drown, burn, cut open, shock, poison, starve, forcibly restrain, addict and inflict brain damage on helpless animals-whose only “offense” is that they weren’t born human-are walking among us, being granted tenure and promotions and receiving huge chunks of our tax dollars to bankroll their cruel and crude experiments. On the frequent occasions when they violate federal animal welfare laws in their laboratories, the government usually just asks them to pinky swear not to do it again. Meanwhile, compassionate people who are willing to speak up about one of the great injustices of our time and use nonviolent protest tactics to effect change for animals may be locked up.

Like all other citizens and businesses, companies and people who abuse animals are already protected from violence and criminal acts by state and federal laws that have been used effectively by police and prosecutors to punish people who engage in illegal conduct against them. To shield them from public opinion and discussion and to protect them from peaceful and heretofore lawful pickets by locking up those who dare to challenge the suffering that occurs inside laboratories is an attack on every American’s right of protest.

Justin Goodman is a research associate supervisor for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as well as an adjunct faculty member in the department of sociology and criminal justice at Marymount University in Arlington, Va. He may be reached c/o PETA at 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.

By Lawrence A. Hansen, M.D.

The Society for Neuroscience just held its annual conference in Chicago. I attended—not as a member, though neuroscience is my field, but to protest the organization’s stated goal of broadening support for animal research. The society, like animal experimenters everywhere, perceives “growing threats” to animal research and seeks to recruit additional allies with a “vested interest” in promoting animal experimentation.

Every vested interest is entitled to its own propaganda, but such an effort warrants a response from neuroscience researchers who instead advocate kindness to animals.

Neuroscientists with established research credentials and a PETA membership are rare. They are often viewed by faculty colleagues as untrustworthy or even treasonous agents provocateurs as they are inclined to raise both scientific and ethical objections to the most egregious abuses of animals within our own universities. Yet medical school faculty members who are also animal activists are uniquely well-qualified to expose basic scientists’ disingenuous, misleading or overreaching claims that their animal research is scientifically and ethically justified because the results may someday, somehow, possibly benefit humans.

Contrived connections between cruelty-intensive basic neuroscience research and future human welfare is a tacit admission by neuroscientists that the general public, which ultimately funds most research, would recoil in horror from their more grotesque monkey, dog or cat experiments and overwhelmingly condemn them if they knew that they were not going to help humans.

One particularly egregious example is a decades-long series of highly invasive monkey experiments performed at universities across the country to study neural control of visual tracking. Luckless monkeys have coils implanted in both eyes, multiple craniotomies for electrode placements in their brains and head immobilization surgeries in which screws, bolts and plates are directly attached to their skulls. This is followed by water deprivation to produce a “work ethic” so that they will visually track moving objects.

First impressions are usually correct in questions of cruelty to animals, and most of us cannot even bear to look at pictures of these monkeys with their electrode-implanted brains and bolted heads being put through their paces in a desperate attempt to get a life-sustaining sip of water.

Such cruelty is justified in the corresponding grant application by invoking the possibility that the resulting data may allow us to find the cause and cure for diseases such as Alzheimer’s. But we who have spent decades in Alzheimer’s disease research recognize that such a blank-check justification is an ethical bait-and-switch since this neural pathway is not even involved in Alzheimer’s disease and these experiments have never been referenced in real Alzheimer’s disease research.

Because such monkey torture will not lead to improved human health, you don’t need to be an animal rights advocate to wonder if an ethical cost-benefit analysis might conclude that the ends just don’t justify the means, especially since rapid advances in sophisticated high-resolution neuroimaging on humans will very soon obviate the need for such invasive techniques.

Because grant money comes with animal research, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees mandated by the Animal Welfare Act to prevent excessive cruelty have been rendered largely ineffectual, as their membership is stacked predominantly with animal researchers.

Most animal experiments on monkeys, dogs, cats and other animals are not related to human benefit, and describing such research as “humane” requires an Orwellian-newspeak definition of the word. “Humane” means to treat with kindness, consideration or mercy, and as long as words have meanings that cannot be twisted Humpty Dumpty–like into whatever we want them to mean, animal experimentation is not and can never be humane.

Lawrence A. Hansen, M.D., is a board-certified pathologist and neuropathologist and a professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California–San Diego, where he also leads the neuropathology core of the Alzheimer Disease Research Center. In March 2009, he was recognized by the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease as one of the top 100 Alzheimer’s disease investigators in the world. Dr. Hansen may be reached c/o People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.