COVID-19, Violations Prompt PETA Call for Northwestern University to Shut down Animal Labs

School Laboratories to ‘Euthanize All Unnecessary Animals’ as Part of COVID-19 Response Plan

For Immediate Release:
March 31, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, Northwestern University (NU) is urging experimenters to “euthanize all unnecessary animals,” which will likely lead to the killing of hundreds or more animals.

PETA fired off a letter today to the university’s president, Morton Schapiro, demanding to know why the school conducts noncritical animal experiments.

Reports obtained from the National Institutes of Health reveal chronic and systemic violations of the Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals in NU’s laboratories. Among other incidents, 1,060 mice received expired medication, 144 mice did not receive analgesics after undergoing surgery, the toes of 43 mice were clipped in unapproved procedures, and the surgical incisions in nine mice were closed with commercial superglue.

NU’s disregard of animal protection laws and admission that it runs noncritical animal experiments prove that the school needs to stop all animal experiments, ban the breeding and purchase of animals, and switch to human-relevant research methods. The university also needs to tell taxpayers how many animals it deemed extraneous and killed in response to COVID-19, PETA says.

“Northwestern University does a sloppy, substandard job of caring for animals in fully staffed laboratories, so nothing good can be expected amid a pandemic,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “The COVID-19 outbreak should be a moral and scientific reckoning for the school, which conducts deadly experiments on animals. If the university can’t prove that these experiments are needed—which we know it can’t—it shouldn’t be wasting taxpayer money on them.”

Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic scientific research—much of it involving animal experimentation—fail to lead to treatments for humans. (Please read under “Lack of benefit for humans” here.) And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

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

PETA’s letter to the university is available here.