PETA Urges Feds to Defund MRIGlobal After New Raft of Animal Welfare Violations
PETA is calling on the federal government to stop sending your tax dollars to an inept contract laboratory that continually proves incapable of staying on the right side of the law, resulting in broken bones, the wrong injections, apparent dehydration, and other misery for the animals imprisoned there.
The Details
In a letter sent today to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, PETA urges the agency to defund MRIGlobal, a scalpel-for-hire laboratory based in Kansas City, Missouri, after the feds found yet another raft of animal welfare violations there that follow previous violations we flagged:
- On August 3, 2023, and again on January 23, 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) cited the facility for violating the federal Animal Welfare Act.
- MRIGlobal has current and/or recent federal contracts worth nearly $6 million dollars.
- PETA is still calling for the feds to stop wasting taxpayers’ hard-earned money on pointless animal experiments.
MRIGlobal’s incompetence is clear in the most recent USDA inspection report from January 23:
- A minipig under anesthesia suffered from a dangerously low body temperature because no one was monitoring it, nor was any staffer trained to do so.
- Four guinea pigs sustained a severe knee injury, a front leg fracture, and rear leg fractures because MRIGlobal kept them in inappropriate cages in which their extremities became entrapped.
- The guinea pigs were then pulled from the experiment and killed.
And this wasn’t the first time. In August 2023, the USDA cited the facility for two “critical” violations:
- Staffers jabbed two long-tailed macaques—an endangered species—with an experimental substance in the wrong muscle. The monkeys were killed because “they could not provide scientifically valid data and to spare them any further unnecessary adverse effects.”
- It was the same story two days later, when staffers incorrectly dosed 32 rabbits with eye drops, causing them pain. Experimenters also killed those animals because data from the experiment would be useless.
The feds previously refused to budge. In a February 7, 2024, letter, PETA urged the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to cancel contracts with MRIGlobal after the USDA had issued an official warning to the facility, a rare step for that agency. Our request was declined, with the agency arguing, “It is in the best interest of the government not to terminate the Department’s contracts with MRIGlobal.”
Why does this matter? Because refusing to sanction a disturbing and persistent culture of noncompliance at MRIGlobal signals to all federal contractors that they can violate federal law with impunity and remain awash in millions of taxpayer dollars.
Take Action
If you reside in the U.S., you can help stop MRIGlobal and all such laboratories from tormenting animals by supporting PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Deal, a practical guide to ending experiments on animals in favor of modern, non-animal research:
And everyone can urge the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to end the importation of endangered long-tailed macaques for experimentation before they’re all gone:
