Chevron Under Fire for Gifts to University Conducting Deadly Dog Experiments

PETA Ads Call On Oil Giant to Cut Off Support of Texas A&M Over Crude Muscular Dystrophy Experiments on Dogs

For Immediate Release:
August 24, 2017

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Starting today, PETA ads showing a desperately ill and crippled golden retriever named Peony and the tagline “Chevron: Stop Fueling Dog-Abusing Texas A&M” will appear on bus shelters near Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon. The ads are part of PETA’s efforts to persuade the oil giant to cut off its funding to Texas A&M University (TAMU) over the school’s cruel and archaic experiments on dogs who have been deliberately bred to have a severe, painful form of canine muscular dystrophy.

Eyewitness video footage obtained by PETA shows dogs in bleak metal cells who struggled to walk, swallow, and even breathe in TAMU’s laboratory. Those who did not exhibit symptoms but who carried the gene for muscular dystrophy were used for breeding more dogs to experiment on. The video shows these dogs frantically pacing and gnawing in frustration on the bars of cramped, barren cages. Decades of these experiments have failed to produce a treatment that reverses the symptoms of human muscular dystrophy.

PETA is calling on Chevron to withhold financial support until TAMU agrees to end the experiments, stop breeding dogs, and release the dogs now caged at the university for adoption.

“Chevron has blood on its hands as long as it gives to Texas A&M,” says PETA’s Dr. Alka Chandna. “The company can and should appeal to the university to stop breeding, tormenting, and killing dogs in studies that don’t work.”

Cutting-edge techniques such as studying cells and tissues from human muscular dystrophy patients in order to understand disease progression and transplanting healthy, human-derived muscle cells into patients are more promising areas of research than studies on dogs. Human-relevant drug-screening platforms accelerate the pipeline for new therapies.

PETA’s efforts to end TAMU’s ineffective dog experiments have received support from patients afflicted with muscular dystrophy, scientists—who have criticized the experiments’ inapplicability to human patients—and public figures, including Miami Dolphins quarterback and TAMU alumnus Ryan Tannehill and commentator Bill Maher, who called the university “dogs’ worst enemy.”

For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.