Historic! Head of Pakistani Prime Minister’s Strategic Reforms Unit Meets With PETA

For Immediate Release:
July 25, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA President Ingrid Newkirk and other representatives of the group recently met with Salman Sufi (head of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s Strategic Reforms Unit) to discuss potential groundbreaking reforms that would seismically shift how animals are treated in his country.

Alongside Newkirk were other PETA staff, including Vice President of International Laboratory Methods Shalin Gala and Chief of Science Advancement and Outreach Dr. Katherine Roe, and they discussed several potential areas of collaboration, including the following:

• Helping universities throughout Pakistan switch to using superior, ethical, economical, non-animal simulation models for veterinary education in order to replace the cruel kidnapping and killing of dogs and other animals for training
• Implementing an education program to help children and adults better understand how to share the world with and care for animals
• Assisting with repatriation efforts for non-native species of animals who’ve been cruelly trafficked into Pakistan to be kept as household pets or whose skins or other body parts would be used as decorations

The meeting followed PETA’s recent calls for Pakistani officials to ban horrific veterinary training exercises on abducted dogs. Shortly afterward, Sufi announced Sharif’s landmark measures prohibiting the use of live animals in such training in Islamabad and surrounding regions.

“From trafficked wildlife to kidnapped dogs in veterinary laboratories, animals across Pakistan will benefit as a result of this historic meeting,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is pleased to be working with a visionary leader like Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the head of his reforms unit, Salman Sufi, and we look forward to a long and productive collaboration that will benefit animals, advance human health, and boost Pakistan’s status on the world stage.”

PETA will next send information to Sufi for Sharif’s consideration in implementing other reforms—including replacing the use of animals in medical training, classroom dissection exercises, and biomedical research with superior, state-of-the-art methods as well as setting up a national non-animal research methods database and working to implement PETA’s Research Modernization Deal.

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.