Animal Testing and Vivisection
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Botox Kills Animals Even Better Than It Kills Wrinkles
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Better LCDs Trump an Animal's Right to Live and Be Left Alone?
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Decompressing Sheep? Boiling Monkeys? Illegal, But Condoned
Creating and Celebrating Primate Obesity and Diabetes
Published October 05, 2009 @ 07:14AM PT
One of the most frustrating aspects of animal research is hearing about research that will do nothing more than tell us what we already know or that involves absurd amounts of both cruelty and money in an effort to cure something with drugs that we already know how to prevent and cure with lifestyle changes.
Such is the case with the notorious Charles River Laboratories' latest "product offering" for animal researchers -- monkeys made intentionally overweight and diabetic:
Court Rules Animal Lab Investigation Records Must Be Turned Over
Published September 23, 2009 @ 09:46AM PT
In Defense of Animals has just issued a press release regarding its years-long effort, beginning with a 2002 lawsuit, to get access to records from a USDA investigation into the notorious Huntingdon Life Sciences labs:
After a seven-year court fight, including the first trial in years involving the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been ordered by a federal judge to disclose 1,017 pages of records obtained during an investigation of controversial toxicology lab Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) to In Defense of Animals, the animal protection group said today.
“These records will shed light on the USDA’s failure to enforce the Animal Welfare Act,” said IDA Research Director Eric Kleiman. “Why did the USDA, later joined by HLS, fight so hard and so long to prevent the public from seeing these records? We’ll know within the 60 days ordered by the Court.”
The records – 503 pages withheld in full, 514 withheld in part (with most heavily redacted) – include test results, notes of observations of primates involved in toxicology testing, Animal Care and Use Committee minutes as well as necropsy reports and requests for veterinary care from six studies.
You can read the rest here.
Animals, Nonviolence, and the International Day of Peace
Published September 21, 2009 @ 02:40PM PT
Today is the International Day of Peace, calling for nonviolence and ceasefire, as I learned last night from Kelly of easyVegan.info. And although my plans to post on a related topic this afternoon have been derailed along with the rest of my day, I'm lucky that Kelly (also a periodic contributor to this blog) wrote her thoughtful post on the topic last night, including this:
The day’s “ceasefire” most certainly does not include the millions of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, horses, dogs, rats, seals, foxes and other domestic and wild-living nonhuman animals who will be slaughtered for food, clothing, vivisection, entertainment and the like. Quite the contrary: humans’ exploitation of nonhumans will continue, unabated, throughout the day and across the globe.
Vivisectors vs. Vivisectors in a New Lawsuit
Published September 17, 2009 @ 07:02AM PT
Wrap your mind around this one: InVivo Therapeutics Corp. is suing Oregon Health and Science University (notorious for its torturous animal experiments), but not as a group opposed to animal research -- rather as a business that hired OHSU to perform animal research. InVivo alleges that OHSU provided improper, substandard care to the monkeys in the study, but of course, InVivo is the company that happily ordered the monkeys paralyzed through the severing of their spinal cords in the first place, so there is no good guy in this lawsuit.
Decompressing Sheep and Starving Monkeys: Animal Labs in Madison
Published September 01, 2009 @ 05:26AM PT
Oh, Madison. Madison, Wisconsin, is a place I very much like, but forever adding to the complexity of my feelings about the small city (which, on a personal level, is also home to long-ago tangled family history) is how often I see un-animal-friendly news coming out of this otherwise progressive section of Wisconsin, largely as a result of one cruel institution: animal research -- specifically, in most cases, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center.
In July, in "Do They Look Like They're 'Enjoying' Life to You?" for example, I wrote briefly about a horrid decades-long study involving the starvation and isolation of rhesus macaques. (And as Madison's active animal rights organization Alliance for Animals points out, non-animal advocates in the area have reacted with discomfort to the unnecessary study as well, including, briefly, the editorial board of a local news station.)
This time, though, the news of cruelty isn't coming out of the primate labs, but rather arises from the University of Wisconsin's apparent longtime habit of using -- and killing -- sheep in decompression experiments. Alliance for Animals shares these extracts from the university's 2008 report on the experiments:
"Generating" Rats, "Recycling" Animals, and Taking a (Concrete) Stand
Published August 24, 2009 @ 02:44PM PT
A few brief snippets from and comments on recent news related to research on animals:
"Create rat models with a focus in toxicology, neuroscience, cardiovascular and inflammatory disease"
"Generate rats with permanent, heritable gene mutations"
"Rats are ideal subjects for research into human diseases"
"Using this new methodology, rats and mice can be generated in as little as four months"
Take your pick as to which of the above, from an article on "creating" rats with genetic mutations to sell for top dollar ($300-500 each) to labs that will then perform cruel research on them, makes you grit your teeth the most. But the first line of the article really says it all: "Hoping to grab a slice of the $1 billion lab animal industry..."
Guardian Contributor Calls Vivisection a "Dead End"
Published August 10, 2009 @ 04:15PM PT
Writers for the Guardian's "Comment Is Free" section are after my heart lately. Just a couple weeks ago, in "Animal Research On the Rise in the UK: A Guardian Writer Weighs In," I commented on and directed you to a thoughtful antivivisection piece by Guardian contributor Peter Tatchell.
And then this past Friday, Kathy Archibald published "The Dead End of Animal Research" there. In her take on a pro-animal research article published in the paper recently (the source for which, she points out, was "not a charity, as stated, and is funded by the pharmaceutical industry to lobby exclusively for animal research"), she gave examples of how animal-based research is bad science (and thus bad for us) as well as bad for the animals:
