Dogs Tormented, Killed in Indiana Labs; PETA Exhibit to Show Dark History of Animal Experiments
For Immediate Release:
August 22, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Because Indiana is the 10th-largest user of dogs for experiments in the U.S., PETA is bringing its free, eye-opening exhibit “Without Consent” to the city this week. The presentation of this provocative display follows the rescue of 4,000 beagles bred for experiments from Indiana-based Inotiv’s now-shuttered breeding facility in Virginia, thanks to a PETA undercover investigation.
When: Wednesday, August 24, through Sunday, August 28, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Where: Monument Circle, across from the Soldiers & Sailors Monument (at the intersection of Monument Circle and E. Market Street)
On display for just five days, “Without Consent” links historical experiments on vulnerable humans—including orphans, immigrant women, soldiers, and impoverished Black men—to the troubled history of experiments on nonconsenting animals through 24 panels bearing descriptions and photographs of nearly 200 tests conducted at U.S. institutions in recent decades.
According to the most recent statistics available (from 2019), Indiana laboratories held or used 1,739 dogs for experiments. Even though high-tech research methods are available—such as organs-on-chips and high-speed computers programmed with human data—dogs are force-fed drugs and used in a variety of invasive and sometimes extremely painful experiments. Most of them are killed. For example, experimenters at locally based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly have subjected dogs to repeated, increasingly powerful electric shocks to induce seizures and just recently threaded tubes up beagles’ cervical spines to collect their cerebral spinal fluid.
Other types of animals have suffered, too. Rats at Eli Lilly endured a spinal nerve surgery meant to produce pain, then had their food withdrawn—causing them to lose up to 15% of their bodyweight—before they were forced to press a lever up to 80 times to finally obtain nourishment as a reward. The company has also refused to ban the debunked forced swim test, in which animals are often dosed with a test substance, dropped into beakers of water, and forced to swim for their lives. Young mice at the University of Indiana were force-fed ethanol to induce liver disease and injected with a virus through the vein in their tail before being killed.
“‘Without Consent’ tells the true stories of dogs and other animals who were harmed and killed in experiments that they did not and could not consent to,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “Humans are only one animal species among many, and having the power to exploit the others does not give us the right to do so.”
PETA is calling on the National Institutes of Health—which gave Indiana laboratories $367,445,009 in taxpayer funds in 2021—to phase out animal experiments and adopt the group’s Research Modernization Deal.
An interactive virtual exhibit is available here. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
