College Cruelty: New Database Ranks Animal Testing Offenders
PETA Pulls Universities’ Animal Experiments Out of the Shadows With Interactive ‘Failed Tests’ Resource
For Immediate Release:
August 14, 2019
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Every year, tens of millions of animals are used in cruel and deadly taxpayer-funded experiments inside university laboratories across the country. Now, PETA—recognizing that all experimentation on animals is cruel and unethical—has created “Failed Tests,” an interactive feature that ranks colleges as “bad,” “worse,” or “worst” for animals. The grades are based on the number of animals covered by the federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA)—including pigs, dogs, cats, rabbits, and monkeys—who are held and used in experiments at the school, the amount of government funding received from the National Institutes of Health, and the number and severity of a school’s AWA violations.
“Students live and work on university campuses for years without knowing that animals are being burned, poisoned, crippled, blinded, and subjected to other cruel treatment right under their noses,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is pulling back the curtain on this widespread collegiate cruelty and asking caring young people to speak out against the abuse of sensitive, sentient beings in their midst.”
PETA points out that a 2018 Pew Research poll found that the majority of Americans oppose animal experimentation, with opposition even greater among younger demographics such as college students. No animal test is prohibited by law, no matter how painful or irrelevant, and mice, rats, birds, reptiles, and amphibians are excluded from protection under federal law.
Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic science research—much of it involving animal experimentation—fail to lead to treatments for humans. And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.
PETA opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence toward other animals. For more information, please click here.
