PETA Exposes Texas A&M’s Lies About Fate of Dogs in Lab, Calls for Release of the 19 Remaining

For Immediate Release:
July 22, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Today, PETA fired off a letter to Texas A&M University President M. Katherine Banks, alerting her to misleading and false statements made by university representatives about Texas A&M’s canine muscular dystrophy (MD) laboratory and offering—again—to take the remaining dogs and place them in loving homes.

In December, Peter Nghiem, the laboratory’s lead experimenter, publicly stated (page 6) that healthy dogs who carry the MD gene are released for adoption from his program, but nine healthy dogs, eight of them carriers, were transferred to another Texas A&M laboratory rather than placed in homes.

A state legislator who called the university was also told that all the dogs still in the laboratory must remain there for round-the-clock veterinary care for canine MD—but only seven out of the 19 dogs still there are afflicted with the disease.

“Texas A&M is denying these dogs their only chance at freedom and lying about it to the public,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on the school to stop warehousing these dogs and allow them out of its barren cages and into loving homes.”

Since PETA first exposed the suffering of the dogs in the laboratory—and under pressure from 500 physicians and humans with MD—Texas A&M has stopped breeding dogs to develop the disease. Many of the nearly 100 dogs have been adopted into homes. Recent records show that the 19 remaining aren’t being used in any study.

Two of the MD-affected dogs, Garen and Grinch, were euthanized in March and May, respectively, after a lifetime of misery in Texas A&M’s laboratory. At just 2 years old, Garen had a swollen tongue and was losing weight. Grinch had developed a host of health conditions related to MD. Both suffered from poor appetite as their condition worsened.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.