PETA Blasts FDA After Uncovering Incompetence, Disregard in Agency’s Laboratories

For Immediate Release:
December 11, 2023

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

A trove of documents recently obtained by PETA has revealed dozens of animal welfare violations at three U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laboratories, prompting PETA to call on the FDA today to redirect its efforts toward non-animal research methods that the agency itself says can prove to be superior.

“Animals were mauled, sickened in curiosity-driven studies, and left to die miserably in the FDA’s laboratories,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on the FDA to do better for animals and human patients and redirect funding to superior, non-animal research.”

For illustrative purposes only. Credit: Doctors Against Animal Experiments

Among the numerous violations that PETA found, workers at the White Oak Consolidated Animal Program in Silver Spring failed to secure a cage properly, allowing two rhesus macaques to escape and fight with other monkeys. Five of the animals sustained bite wounds to their hands, feet, and tongues, requiring the amputation of fingers and toes. Workers also botched the setup of an anesthesia machine, killing a hamster who died while struggling to breathe and bleeding from the nose.

At the Center for Veterinary Medicine in Laurel, exposed fence wire injured the paws of three caged dogs. And at the National Center for Toxicological Research in Jefferson, Arkansas, a rat sustained a gaping wound that fully exposed shoulder muscle after workers put the animal in the wrong cage, causing a fight with another rat. Four additional rats were sickened and one died after they were given a carcinogenic chemical.

The FDA has acknowledged the limitations of animal testing, admitting that “alternative methods have the potential to provide both more timely and more predictive information.” But the FDA allocated just $5 million for “Reducing Animal Testing Through Alternative Methods” in its 2023 budget, a sliver of its $6.7 billion spending plan. PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Deal provides a strategy for replacing animals with modern, human-relevant research methods.

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, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.