Covance Lays Off Employees
Update: As another indicator of the decline in the demand for its cruel services, just one month after Covance announced that it would be closing its animal-testing laboratory in Chandler, Arizona, the company has announced that it will also be laying off 50 employees at its facility in Madison, Wisconsin, where thousands of primates and other animals endure painful and lethal tests every year.
Just three years after it opened following a long battle with PETA and local citizens, a laboratory owned by a notorious animal testing company, Covance, in Chandler, Arizona, is closing because of lack of demand for its cruel and deadly services.
Shutting Down Cruelty …
When plans to build the Chandler facility were uncovered in 2005, PETA worked with outraged local residents to try to stop it and managed to delay its construction. The world’s largest contract testing laboratory, Covance subjects animals to painful and deadly tests of cosmetics ingredients, personal and household products, food additives, industrial chemicals, and drugs. Covance is also the world’s largest breeder of dogs and the largest U.S. importer of primates to be tormented and killed in experiments.
Despite media censorship, word clearly got around about the horrendous cruelty found inside Covance’s laboratories, including physical and psychological abuse of primates and lack of veterinary care for sick and injured animals.
The shutdown of the Arizona facility follows the 2010 closure of a Covance lab in Virginia, where shocking abuse of animals was exposed by a PETA undercover investigation. Around that same time, Covance scrapped plans to build a massive facility elsewhere in Virginia that PETA had urged officials to reject.
… But Keeping Up the Pressure
These closures will save countless monkeys, dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, and other animals from suffering, but Covance is still in business, so PETA’s work goes on, including a recent protest at the company’s annual meeting, where PETA also presented a resolution calling on the company to make animal welfare improvements.
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