In the wake of the recent release of our undercover investigation exposing cruelty and suffering inside animal labs at the University of Utah, students, local PETA supporters, and members of Salt Lake Animal Advocacy Movement gathered outside the university's Park Building yesterday and urged the swarm of spectators to help put an end to the cruelty committed against the dogs, cats, and other animals confined to the University's labs.

The demonstrators weren't just humans—some adorable companion animals campaigned for the cause too. Together, they collected signatures for a petition to scrap the law that requires government-run shelters to make homeless animals—even those who are friendly, trained, and adoptable—available to universities and private labs for experimentation and testing. How could you not put your name to something these guys are supporting:

Join the effort and urge the University of Utah to stop abusing shelter animals in its labs immediately.

Posted by Logan Scherer

For more than eight months this year, a PETA investigator worked undercover inside University of Utah animal labs, where she documented the miserable conditions and daily suffering of dogs, cats, monkeys, rats, mice, rabbits, frogs, cows, pigs, and sheep. Today, The Salt Lake Tribune ran a story about the investigation, including the response from Tom Parks, the university's vice president for research. The response is (not so) stunningly callous: "None of the things she alleges are substantive. It's a remarkably banal list of ordinary events in an animal-care facility."

Here's a list of the things the university considers "banal"—part of an "ordinary" day in the "animal-care facility":

• Cutting the spinal cords and tender eyes of rabbits and tying off the nerves in the paws of rats to study pain
• Buying homeless cats from animal shelters, drilling holes into their heads, and injecting their kittens' brains with harmful chemicals
• Cutting into the chests of dogs from animal shelters and implanting medical devices for deadly heart experiments
• Drilling holes into monkeys' skulls, confining them in tiny cages, and keeping them constantly thirsty so that they will "cooperate" in experiments in exchange for a few drops of water
• Inflicting mice with tumors the size of golf balls that covered the animals' bodies

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Brain injections, desperate thirst, tumors, and holes in skulls: just another banal day in the lab, right?

We have filed complaints against the university with the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and local law-enforcement officials, and you can take action to help animals at the University of Utah too.

Posted by Logan Scherer

Yesterday morning, Procter & Gamble's annual meeting received a special guest when a PETA doggie (a gal in a costume, not a canine in Norfolk) stopped by to urge P&G—the maker of Iams dog food—to stop making animals suffer in laboratories.

PETA's ongoing campaign to end animal testing at Iams has led the manufacturer to end all invasive and deadly animal tests involving dogs and cats—but Iams refuses to end its support for experiments on other species, and it still keeps as many as 700 dogs locked up in its laboratories for feeding trials and nutritional studies.

To encourage passersby to choose cruelty-free doggie chow, PETA demonstrators passed out free samples of V-dog high-protein dog food. Not only is V-dog not tested on animals, it's also vegan!

V-dog is one of many alternatives to animal-unfriendly dog food. You can check out a complete list of cruelty-free dog foods here.

Posted by Amanda Schinke

flickr / CC

Many of you have been writing to and calling the University of California–Irvine to demand that it stop using animals in horrible classroom experiments, and your efforts have paid off. The university has just announced that it's ending deadly procedures using rats and replacing them with sophisticated computer simulations.

In the cruel neuroscience experiments conducted at the university, undergrads were drilling holes into rats' skulls, damaging their brains with chemicals, and forcing them to perform in behavioral experiments to assess the brain damage they inflicted. Then the rats were killed. Following a complaint filed by PETA that included suggestions for non-animal alternatives, as well as thousands of e-mails, letters, and phone calls from our supporters, UC–Irvine conducted a review of the experiment and decided that modern, effective non-animal methods will now be used instead of animals.

Because of this victory, as many as 200 rats will be saved from suffering each year.

This is great news, but animals are still suffering in other labs, so it's no time to rest on our laurels.

Case in point: At Arizona State University (ASU), baby rats are killed in classroom experiments in which students remove the animals' small intestines and uteruses. In other experiments, frogs' brains are destroyed when pins are stuck through their skulls, and rabbits have holes cut into their chests and are injected with various drugs before being killed.

Please take a moment to contact ASU and urge the school to follow the example of UC–Irvine by putting an end to the use of animals in classroom laboratories once and for all.

Posted by Jeff Mackey

paddleasia / CC

Charles River Laboratories has finally had to own up to killing 32 monkeys under their "care." The monkeys were baked alive when a thermostat malfunctioned; no alarm system was in place to alert staff to save the monkeys. Nobody even knew about the deaths until the following morning.

Charles River's announcement follows a string of contact with PETA from a whistleblower claiming to be a Charles River employee, who was concerned about what appeared to be gross negligence. We immediately followed up with a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (the body charged with enforcing the minimal standards of the Animal Welfare Act), which subsequently opened an inquiry into the lab.

"This is a terrible and unfortunate tragedy," the company said in a statement released to the media. The monkeys were slated to be used in preclinical drug experiments, so Charles River's concern is quite curious. The deaths were written off as the result of "several human errors"—unlike the frequent and intentional monkey murders that preclinical testing laboratories voluntarily participate in.

This accident is only one disgusting incident among many for Charles River's abysmal record. They were cited for 22 violations of the ever-so-minimal standards of the pitifully limited Animal Welfare Act in 2005 alone, and they netted 20 violations (as reported to federal officials) in 2006 and 2007.

Stay tuned to this spot. More's afoot on this front.

Posted by Sean Conner

Update: Please click here to take action on this issue.

I wish I could say that the title of this entry were anything other than a simple statement of fact. But according to shocking allegations made by a former animal technician at Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories (SNBL), the recent boiling of a live female macaque monkey—who was evidently placed inside a giant rack washer inside her wire cage and killed during the 180 degree, 20-minute cycle—was just one in a long list of egregious animal welfare violations at the animal-testing facility.

The whistleblower, whose employment was terminated shortly after she complained about these apparent violations, told reporters that SNBL’s reaction to her inquiry about the incident with the macaque was to complain about the additional paperwork that it was generating.

"When I inquired about it,” she told a Kiro TV reporter who investigated her allegations, “the reply I got back was 'Oh, dear.' Think of the paperwork. That just upset me to my soul because no animal in there should die because of somebody’s mistake or negligence or lack of compassion. "

Last week, PETA sent the whistleblower a $1,000 check and a basket of groceries to thank her for standing up for the animals abused in this lab despite the fact that her decision to do so likely led to her firing. As PETA President Ingrid Newkirk puts it, “Her ‘reward’ for revealing SNBL’s callous and vicious treatment of monkeys was unemployment. But in our book and that of all primates, she’s a hero.”

The USDA is currently investigating this incident, so there’s a chance that the lab will be held accountable for this horrific negligence, but there isn’t much hope that those responsible will be charged with cruelty to animals. As the Seattle television station which has been covering this story pointed out, although causing unnecessary suffering or death to an animal is illegal in the state, there’s an exemption for this on the books in cases where the cruelty is connected with “any properly conducted scientific experiments.”

As horrific as this story is, it would never even have come to light in the first place had it not been for the whistleblower’s willingness to speak out, and we are extremely grateful to her for her bravery. You can watch investigative footage of this lab here, and for more information about what you can do to help animals suffering in laboratories, click here.