PETA Demands That Feds Investigate Duke University 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 Duke University—which in FY2020 received $612,549,441 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 Duke University’s purported ramping down of animal care and cessation of its experiments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—one university experimenter reported killing nearly 168 mice in one day as a result. 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 Duke University 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.
