Exposed: 1,000 Dogs Caged in Cleveland-Area Labs; PETA Exhibit Shows Today’s Alternatives to Cruel History of Animal Experiments
For Immediate Release:
July 19, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Four thousand beagles bred for experiments are being released from the now-shuttered national supplier Envigo, including dogs who may have ended up in local laboratories, so to celebrate, PETA is bringing dog treats to the opening day of the Midwest tour of its free, eye-opening exhibit “Without Consent.” The group’s chief scientist, Dr. Frances Cheng, will be present to offer explosive details about the use of dogs and other animals in horrific experiments conducted in Cleveland—and others paid for by Ohio taxpayers—on Wednesday at KeyBank Promenade.
When: Wednesday, July 20, 10 a.m.
Where: KeyBank Promenade at the intersection of Superior Avenue and Ontario Street, 50 Public Square, Ste. 1700, Cleveland
“Without Consent,” which will be on display for five days, explores the troubled history of experiments on nonconsenting animals through 24 panels bearing descriptions and photographs of nearly 200 tests conducted at U.S. institutions in recent decades, including at the Cleveland Clinic and at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded horrific experiments on dogs under Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In Ohio, laboratories keep an estimated 1,700 dogs in cages, including nearly 1,000 in the Cleveland area alone. Despite the existence today of state-of-the-art research methods, including organs-on-chips and high-speed computers programmed with human data, these dogs are force-fed drugs and used in a variety of sometimes extremely painful and even bizarre experiments. Most of them are killed in the end. Cleveland Clinic experimenters are conducting “bladder control” studies on cats, in which experimenters deliberately crush the animals’ nerves, distend their vaginas, and stretch their bladders to make them leak. Experimenters there have also burned pigs and rubbed bacteria into the wounds and cut into the skulls of mice. As revealed in a PETA video investigation, they have also inserted glass coverslips to create “cranial windows” to peer into the animals’ exposed brains, among many other painful and invasive experiments.
No one can rest easy feeling that these experiments are vital or that animals are well treated in the process.
“‘Without Consent’ shows exactly how loving, loyal, gentle dogs and other animals are mutilated and killed in experiments that they did not and could not consent to,” Cheng says. “Humans are only one animal species among many, and having the power to exploit the others doesn’t give us the right to do so—something that is also unforgivably backward, given our options in the 21st century.”
About 110 million animals—each one an individual who feels pain and fear—suffer and are killed every year in U.S. laboratories, yet 95% of new drugs that test safe and effective in animal studies go on to fail or cause harm in human clinical trials. PETA is calling on the National Institutes of Health—which gave the Cleveland Clinic nearly $397 million in taxpayer funds between 2018 and 2021—to phase out animal experiments and adopt the group’s Research Modernization Deal.
An interactive virtual exhibit is available here. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
