PETA to Georgia Governor and Department of Public Health: Shut Down Animal Labs

Amid Rising COVID-19 Cases, Group Slams Waste of Animals’ Lives, Taxpayer Money and Risk to Public Health

For Immediate Release:
December 1, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Spiking COVID-19 cases are compromising Georgia’s reopening plan, and PETA is calling on the governor and the Georgia Department of Public Health to cut cruel animal experiments statewide—starting with tests on animals, many of whom institutions deemed to be non-essential in response to the pandemic—and protect human health by having staff not come into laboratories to conduct worthless experiments.

In its letter, PETA points out that during the initial COVID-19 shutdown, universities in Georgia issued guidance deeming many of their experiments—and the animals used in them—extraneous, which resulted in the apparent euthanasia of numerous animals in their laboratories, including the following:

• Georgia Tech instructed its experimenters to “ramp down operations” and “identify essential research experiments,” which it claimed “should be a limited set of the current laboratory bench-based experimentation.”
• The University of Georgia (UGA) urged its experimenters to stop “[a]ll non-essential [animal] research … as soon as possible.” The university also issued a plan instructing experimenters to “[c]ull animals not needed and begin breeding solely to maintain valuable colonies”; “[f]lag most valuable rat and mouse cages … as ‘VIP’”; “[e]uthanize rodents requiring repeated treatment when research staff are unable to complete them”; conduct “[t]argeted euthanasia of mice and rats, for non-‘VIP’, priority save, cages”; and “[e]uthanize remaining animals as outlined in the URAR disaster plan, following sentient animal order.”

PETA questions why animals deemed by the universities to be extraneous are being bought, bred, trapped, or experimented on in the first place and notes that staff conducting these experiments are being put at unnecessary risk as a result of working in close proximity to others. In addition, if animal testing resumes and Georgia shuts down again, more animals may be euthanized, wasting taxpayer money that could have funded superior, human-relevant studies.

“This pandemic should be a wake-up call to shift away from experiments on animals and toward a ‘new normal’ of modern, non-animal research methods,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on state officials to learn from the past and keep all animals from suffering in cruel and wasteful tests.”

More than 90% of results from basic scientific research—much involving animal testing—fails to lead to treatments for humans, and 95% of new medications found to be safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA previously called for an audit of public money, personnel, property, equipment, and space used by Georgia Tech and UGA for animal tests deemed non-essential, noting that the universities received nearly $823 million in state appropriations in the last fiscal year, some of which may have funded such animal experiments.

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.