PETA Demands That Feds Investigate University of Pennsylvania for Killing Animals Deemed Extraneous

For Immediate Release:
November 18, 2021

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

This morning, PETA called on National Institutes of Health (NIH) Division of Program Integrity Director Deborah Kearse to investigate the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)—which in FY2020 received $597,826,263 in funding from NIH, part of which may have supported animal testing—for apparently wasting taxpayer funds on tests on animals whom experimenters deemed extraneous and killed.

The group’s request follows a statement from UPenn experimenter Sunny Shin, who reported the laboratory’s killing of over three quarters of its “research animals” to abide by the university’s directive to limit research in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The school’s actions mirror decisions by other universities across the country, such as that by Rutgers University, which reportedly killed 23,000 mice slated to be used in experiments deemed “non-essential” while also receiving $1.15 million in state taxpayer funds as compensation for destroying the animals.

“If the University of Pennsylvania and other schools can deem tests noncritical, the animals shouldn’t have been there in the first place and taxpayers shouldn’t have footed the bill,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on NIH to launch an investigation and recover taxpayer funds wasted on admittedly non-essential animal experiments.”

PETA notes that calling animals “unnecessary,” “non-essential,” “noncritical,” or “extraneous” or using other similar terminology to describe them should raise significant red flags—particularly given the widespread euthanasia of such animals—regarding why such experiments were approved and funded in the first place.

PETA’s letter is available upon request. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on the group’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow it on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.