The University of Miami’s Chinchilla Supplier Faces Criminal Investigation After PETA Probe

Pus-Filled Eyes, Exposed Bones Found at Supplier Warehousing Hundreds of the Animals Sold to Laboratories

For Immediate Release:
February 18, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA fired off a letter this morning to Julio Frenk, the president of the University of Miami, calling on the school to stop buying chinchillas to experiment on. The letter comes after a new PETA undercover video investigation into Moulton Chinchilla Ranch, a massive breeding mill in Minnesota that supplied chinchillas to the University of Miami, revealed that chinchillas were suffering from open wounds, exposed bones, infections, and other painful injuries and untreated ailments. As a result of PETA’s findings, local officials executed a search warrant and are conducting a criminal investigation.

A PETA eyewitness who worked at Moulton Chinchilla Ranch gathered video footage and photographs showing that nearly 1,000 chinchillas on the premises were confined to small, exposed wire cages. The animals were denied veterinary care for abscessed and ruptured mammary tissue and protruding or pus-filled eyes, among other serious conditions. One chinchilla died after being deprived of veterinary care for a raw, bloody wound and another after the breeder’s dog attacked her and she suffered overnight without care. Yet another had a large mass under the chin. The mill owner admitted to killing this one and others by snapping their necks, which does not cause a painless or quick death.

Moulton Chinchilla Ranch sells the chinchillas to laboratories, and staff affiliated with the University of Miami as well as the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Navy, Harvard Medical School, and numerous universities in China, Germany, and the U.S. have conducted experiments on them. Records show that experimenters at the University of Miami have induced painful ear infections in chinchillas by injecting a strain of influenza in the animals’ ear tissue. They were kept alive for seven days and then killed.

“Moulton Chinchilla Ranch kept animals continuously confined to wire cages, which gave them nowhere to hide (a basic need of prey animals), left them to suffer and die without even minimal veterinary care, and sold them to laboratories to be further harmed and killed,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Cruelty Investigations Daphna Nachminovitch. “PETA is calling on every laboratory that did business with this chinchilla mill to stop using these vulnerable animals in experiments.”

PETA has also submitted evidence to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has cited Moulton Chinchilla Ranch for more than 100 federal Animal Welfare Act violations since 2013 and, in 2018, filed a formal complaint against the mill, which is still pending.

PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.