Houston Billboards Condemn Texas A&M’s Stomach-Turning Experiments on Dogs
PETA Ads Urge University to Stop Crippling, Killing Golden Retrievers in Worthless Muscular Dystrophy Experiments
For Immediate Release:
September 14, 2017
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
After Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, PETA’s Community Animal Project rescue team members, along with a staffer from our sheltering partner Virginia Beach SPCA, spent a week on the ground in Texas, where they trudged through the floodwater to search for abandoned, lost, and injured animals.
Meanwhile, another PETA effort in Texas has only intensified. PETA is turning up the heat on Texas A&M University (TAMU) with a billboard and mall ads in highly trafficked areas in Houston urging the school to end its cruel muscular dystrophy (MD) experiments on golden retrievers and other dogs.
The group also created a mobile billboard that was driven around TAMU President Michael Young’s neighborhood in Bryan and the university campus in College Station from September 5 through 9 with a direct message to the president telling him to shut down the shameful dog laboratory. The two-sided mobile billboard, which featured an image of Peony—a dog who was deliberately bred to be afflicted with MD and subjected to painful surgeries and tests before being killed two months shy of her second birthday—proclaimed, “Sit. Stay. Beg for Mercy. Texas A&M Cripples and Kills Dogs” and “TAMU President Young: Close This Dog Lab.” The stationary billboard declares, “Houston, We Have a Problem. End Texas A&M’s Muscular Dystrophy Tests on Dogs.” The mall ads state, “Sit. Stay. Beg for Mercy. Stop Cruel Muscular Dystrophy Tests on Dogs at TAMU.“
The stationary billboard can currently be seen in Houston near the I-45 North, 6/10 of a mile north of West Mount Houston.
The mall ads are currently up in the following locations:
- Memorial City Mall in Houston
- The Woodlands Mall in The Woodlands
“For 35 years, dogs have suffered in cruel muscular dystrophy experiments, most recently at Texas A&M, which haven’t resulted in a cure or treatment for reversing the course of muscular dystrophy in humans,” PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo says. “PETA is calling on the college to redirect its resources into humane research methods that don’t leave suffering and dead dogs in their wake.”
Experimenters at TAMU led by Joe Kornegay breed golden retrievers to develop a severe form of canine MD, which ravages their bodies and causes progressive muscle wasting and weakness. Records and video footage obtained by PETA document the miserable lives and deaths of dogs in TAMU’s MD laboratory, including those of two golden retrievers named Peony and Jelly and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Buckley. Dogs who don’t exhibit symptoms but carry the gene for MD are used for breeding in the school’s laboratory, where they’re left alone to pace frantically on the hard, slatted floors and gnaw in frustration on cage bars.
PETA’s efforts to end TAMU’s ineffective dog experiments have received support from scientists—who have criticized the experiments’ inapplicability to human patients—public figures, including Miami Dolphins quarterback and TAMU alumnus Ryan Tannehill and commentator Bill Maher, who called the university “dogs’ worst enemy”; and patients who have proclaimed, “Not in my name.”
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
