PETA Statement: Emory University’s Critical Violation

For Immediate Release:
October 17, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Vice President Alka Chandna on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s citation for a critical violation of animal welfare laws inside Emory University’s laboratories:

PETA is calling on the government to stop using taxpayer dollars to fund the horror show that is animal experimentation at Emory University. A federal report obtained by PETA reveals that a vole died of dehydration when no one noticed—over a period of five days—that a watering device didn’t work. The small animal was dependent on employees, who were so incompetent they had placed the water bottle in the cage incorrectly.

Nine additional federal reports document violations of federal animal welfare guidelines and reveal that incompetence has resulted in pain, misery, and death for animals in the school’s laboratories. A living rat was found in a freezer intended for dead animals. Workers had gassed the rat with carbon dioxide and then botched an attempt to break the rodent’s neck. The mutilated animal woke up in a freezer containing the carcasses of other animals. An experimenter amputated the toes of adult mice, simply as a method of identification. Another experimenter snipped the tails of mice, leading to complications. Yet another put ear tags on mice improperly, “resulting in serious health and welfare issues.” Last year, a surgical sponge was left in the abdomen of an 8-year-old female rhesus macaque monkey following surgery, and she had to undergo a second surgery to remove the sponge. This was the third such incident at the university during the 26-month period from December 2015 to February 2018.

In 2018, Emory received more than $350 million in taxpayer funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and nearly half of these grants are estimated to fund experiments on animals. When an institution cannot comply with the meager protections of federal animal welfare laws, it has no business receiving taxpayer dollars. Enough is enough: NIH must bar the university from receiving any additional funding.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.