It's been years since my high school biology class, but I still remember the smell of the rotting pig corpses that we mutilated over the course of a nightmarish three-day lab. Piled in the corner of the room in a black garbage bag, the carcasses emanated a rancid smell that only got worse each day, and after each lab period, we all ate lunch in the same room—the lab doubled as our cafeteria.

Today, though, it's the sweet smell of victory that I'm waking up to. Nine months ago, a compassionate student at Oakton Community College contacted PETA about a professor who was having students in an anatomy and physiology class cut open live rats and mudpuppies to observe how their organs worked. We immediately contacted school officials to share information on the intelligent, complex animals who were being tormented and killed for these experiments and presented officials with cruelty-free and effective educational alternatives. This week, Oakton Community College let us know that it has stopped using live animals in ALL of its classes!

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We're urging all schools (hear that, ASU?) to follow Oakton's enlightened path and replace their cruel classroom animal experiments with modern, more effective non-animal learning methods. Biology is the study of life—it just doesn't make any sense to kill animals to teach it. Urge schools in your area to get smart and go cruelty-free.

Posted by Logan Scherer

On Sunday, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times ran a great article about a recent undercover investigation conducted at a Hampshire laboratory that tests Dysport—a wrinkle-erasing drug similar to Botox—on mice. The investigation was conducted by our friends at the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, and among the most disturbing findings of the investigation was the fact that technicians repeatedly broke the backs of mice while attempting to kill them with ball-point pens. Yes, you read that right. Staffers then used the same ball-point pens to fill out their victims' death records.

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Laboratory workers were also videotaped botching injections and swearing at rabbits. One staffer calls a struggling rabbit "a little s**t" and "a disgrace."

As with Botox, both in the U.S. and the U.K., each batch of Dysport is tested on animals. More than 41,000 mice were killed in Dysport tests in a six-month period at just this one laboratory.

Horrors like these don't just take place across the pond either. In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that more than 100 million mice and rats are killed in experiments every year. And here in the U.S. these sensitive, intelligent animals are not protected by any federal laws, even though they are the animals who suffer most frequently at the hands of animal experimenters. Investigation after investigation shows that these highly social animals are handled like they are disposable laboratory equipment instead of living animals who deserve respect and kindness.

Posted by Alisa Mullins

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It's true: Dollar General cares—about its customers' concerns and about animals.

After we received complaints that Dollar General, which has thousands of stores across the U.S., was selling hideously cruel glue traps, we wrote to the bargain retailer. In our letter, we described how animals who get stuck on glue traps can suffer for days before finally dying of starvation or dehydration. Many victims of glue traps rip their skin from their own faces and bodies as they try to escape, and some resort to chewing off their own limbs while trying to free themselves. We also let the company know that there are plenty of humane ways to deal with mice and rats.

Dollar General responded to our letter by announcing that it will stop selling glue traps. Just like that. The company didn't hem and haw—officials simply made a compassionate decision.

Dollar General joins other large retailers, including Albertsons, Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, and Safeway, that have stopped selling glue traps after discussions with PETA. Please thank the company for its decision—and then ask home-improvement biggie baddie Lowe's to follow suit.

Posted by Karin Bennett

Last year, PETA filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Motomco, the glue trap manufacturer that supplies Lowe's with its sticky death traps. Our complaint stated that Motomco was selling misleadingly labeled glue traps designed to make people believe that these traps were somehow acceptable. The label stated that the glue trap contained a naturally occurring anesthetic called eugenol, implying that animals caught in the trap did not suffer or feel pain. In reality, they do suffer and feel extreme pain.

We recently received a letter from the FTC letting us know that our complaint has officially been closed—because Motomco has removed the misleading claim about eugenol from its packaging and promotion materials!

Since Motomco's glue traps are the only brand that Lowe's sells—and Lowe's claims that it only sells glue traps that are "humane" because of eugenol—we hope that the change in Motomco's packaging will be the final push that Lowe's needs to pull glue traps from its shelves. Because it can no longer hide behind Motomco's misrepresentations, we've written to the home improvement company asking it to immediately rid its stores of the cruelest mouse traps on the market today.

Humane alternatives do exist and it's time for Lowe's to join other retailers, including Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Safeway, Dollar Tree, and Albertsons, in banning the sale of glue traps. Click here to find out how you can help.

Posted by Karin Bennett

New clothes and a new crush may get many students excited about school, but the surest way to make someone dread biology class is to mention that cruel old standby, dissection.

Since Steve-O knows that only a "jackass" would force a kid to cut up an animal and call it "science," the Wildboyz star was on hand outside Fairfax High School in Los Angeles this afternoon to kick off Cut Out Dissection Month.

His new ad aims to empower kids to fight for their rights not to dissect on animals and to pressure educators to provide alternatives to dissection.

Every year, nearly 6 million animals, including frogs, rats, pigs, and cats, are cut open in cruel, outdated dissection exercises that teach students to dismiss concerns about animal suffering. It's no secret that many violent offenders, including serial killers get their start abusing animals.

Kinder, more effective alternatives to dissection exist and offer students the opportunity to focus on learning instead of cringing through animal cut-ups. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if all schools implemented only humane biology lessons, students would forever remember that this duodenum, not this one, is found in their small intestine.

Posted by Karin Bennett

P.S. More pics of Steve-O's unveiling after the jump.

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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

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Since Michael Jackson's passing on Thursday, there have been hundreds of news stories ranging from how he influenced just about every musician performing today to how he's responsible for the Academy's recent decision to allow 10 nominations for “Best Picture” (no, really!). It got us thinking: What if Michael's music could be used to help animals?

We've written to Michael Jackson's estate asking for the rights to the singer's first solo hit, "Ben," which was written for the 1972 film of the same name. This beautiful song is about the friendship between a lonely boy and a rat named Ben, and we're hoping to use it to raise awareness about the plight of rats and other animals tormented in laboratory experiments.

Mice and rats make up the vast majority of animals used in experiments, but because they are excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act, they are denied even minimal legal protection. Part of the message of "Ben" is that rats are frequently misunderstood. (For example—did you know that rats and mice are fastidiously clean, intelligent, and highly sociable animals—they even giggle!) In the song, Jackson sings:

Ben, most people would turn you away
I don't listen to a word they say
They don't see you as I do
I wish they would try to.

We hope we'll be able to use this song to inspire people to understand rats a little better and to join our campaign to stop cruel and archaic animal experiments on them.

Posted by Amanda Schinke

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All this week, Slate has been running a five-part series on animal experiments. The series starts out by telling the story of a dog named Pepper who was stolen in 1965 and who "changed American science." As the author, Daniel Engber, points out, the fall-out from Pepper's story led to the 1966 passage of the Animal Welfare Act—the first federal law protecting animals in laboratories.

In today's installment, Engber describes the time he spent as a grad student working on a macaque named Clayton in a university laboratory. He describes how he returned to the lab years later to find that, while his life has moved on—and out of the laboratory—Clayton is still imprisoned, his whole world limited to just two rooms:

In all the time I'd been gone, Clayton had lived in the same room, on the same feeding schedule, and with many of the same neighbors. … Every day or two, he's carted off to a room painted all in black, and his head is fixed in place by the post that still protrudes from his skull. He sits there as always, staring at targets on a computer screen. When he moves his eyes the way he's supposed to, he gets a droplet of Tang as a reward.

Engber also talks about PETA's famous Silver Spring monkeys case, which was the impetus behind sweeping changes made to the Animal Welfare Act in 1985, including the creation of oversight committees that we are currently hounding to do their jobs.

While the series of articles focuses on the use of dogs in experiments, it also describes what is done to rats and mice. That's because no discussion of vivisection can rightly avoid the elephant (or, in this case, mouse) in the room—which is the fact that most of the whopping number of animals used in experiments are these small mammals, who, for no reason other than prejudice and convenience, are still specifically excluded from the Animal Welfare Act.

We strongly recommend taking a minute or two to check out the series—and don't miss part IV, which talks about PETA's undercover investigation at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

Posted by Alisa Mullins

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Yep, rats and mice are finally having their day. Saturday's Wall Street Journal (the second-largest paper in the country and the most respected) features a front-page article about the work of PETA and others to gain protection for rats and mice in laboratories.

Shockingly, even though rats and mice comprise more than 95 percent of the animals used in experiments, they are specifically excluded from the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), the only federal law that protects animals in laboratories. According to the U.S. government, in its infinite wisdom, rats and mice (as well as birds and "cold-blooded" animals) are not "animals." (It's nonsensical, we know.)

That's why PETA has been doing end-runs around the worthless AWA by going straight to the companies that are required to test their products and pointing out the benefits of using effective and humane alternatives. We also monitor the various government agencies' testing programs and object every time we learn about a proposed test on animals that is redundant or for which non-animal alternatives are available. By doing this, we have been able to get dozens of tests on animals stopped (or the number of animals used greatly reduced), which has saved tens of thousands of animals' lives.

We think it's about time that our elected officials thought about rats and mice, don't you? Send a message to your members of Congress demanding that rats and mice be treated like the sensitive animals (not vegetables or minerals) they are.

Posted by Alisa Mullins

When you have an epic battle as big as PETA's campaign to convince home improvement behemoth Lowe's to stop selling glue traps, you have to decide if you are "a man or a mouse," as the saying goes. Personally, I'm a mouse. I'm PETA's original "sexy mouse," in fact. Yes, that's me, writhing in a giant "glue trap" outside Lowe's annual meeting last year.

As a proud sexy-mouse veteran, I'm pleased to unveil the newest addition to our Lowe's campaign:

But don't worry! Our classic "sexy mice" are still hitting the streets to let shoppers know that animals stuck in glue traps can suffer for days before succumbing to starvation, dehydration, or suffocation.

Leave a comment and let us know which demonstration you like the most: the traditional sexy mouse, "Mickey" and "Minnie Mouse," or our giant rat and anti-Lowe's minivan. I think you can guess which one is my favorite.

Posted by Liz Graffeo

Though we can all agree that neglecting to feed an animal companion is pretty low, what about knowingly starving or denying an animal water until he or she dies? Well, that's what glue traps do, which is why selling them makes Lowe's the lowest of the low.

We've sent out one of our custom campaign vans to visit Lowe's stores in North Carolina, to remind shoppers of what, exactly, the glue traps that Lowe's sells inevitably do—cause immense suffering and ensure a slow death to whatever animal is unlucky enough to touch one.

Check out the photos from our demo (and just imagine what you'd think if you passed this van with our mouse friend here in the driver's seat … yeah, we're good at grabbing attention):

Unlike other major retailers, such as Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid, Albertsons, and Safeway, Lowe's has refused to drop these deadly devices from its inventory. Join Ms. Giant Rat in encouraging Lowe's to change its cruel policy.

Posted by Sean Conner

Kathy Guillermo is the director of PETA’s Laboratory Investigations Department, where she works to expose the waste and cruelty of the multi-billion dollar animal experimentation industry. She also happens to be a damn fine writer, (and she’s got a great sense for snappy titles). This op-ed, about a recent study showing that some rodents can use tools, recently appeared in The Raleigh News Observer.

Some animals can use tools? Who cares?
-by Kathy Guillermo, PETA

Years ago, I had a wonderful companion animal named Angus. He was a remarkable little fellow who loved to greet visitors to my house and snuggle next to me on the sofa. His favorite food was Chinese carry-out, and he went bonkers when he saw the white cardboard containers come out of the plastic bag on the kitchen table. He was loyal and sweet-tempered - probably not so different from your own dog or cat.

Except that Angus wasn't a dog or cat. He was a rat. A brown rat with shiny black eyes and a long pink tail. He lived on a table-top in my home, where he never had to be shut in his cage. He liked to cruise around the house perched on my shoulder.

So it was with particular interest that I read the just-released study on rats, which found that rats can be trained to use tools, to understand the tools' functions and to choose the most appropriate tool when presented with more than one. Before this, the study says, it was thought that only primates and some birds, in addition to humans, were capable of figuring this out.

So here's my response, and I hope it's yours too: Who cares?

Should we change the way we view rats because some of them can be taught how to use a little rake to draw food toward themselves? Of course not. We should change our attitude toward rats because they are thinking, feeling, living beings with a sense of humor, an affectionate nature and a capacity for suffering that the human race should stop ignoring.

This study is just the latest in a long line of experiments that should have convinced us of this long ago. Last July, researchers at the University of Berne, Switzerland, announced that rats are influenced by the kindness of strangers. If rats have been assisted by rats they've never met before, they are more likely to help other rats in the future. A sort of rodent version of "Pay It Forward."

Other studies have shown that rats become distressed when they see other rats being electrically shocked. We shouldn't be surprised - though apparently the experimenters were - that the rats become even more agitated if they know or are related to the rat being shocked.

Scientists with special recording equipment have shown that rats laugh out loud in frequencies that can't be heard by the human ear. Young rats who are being tickled are the most likely to giggle. Rats have been shown to be altruistic and have risked their own lives to save other rats, especially when the rats in peril are babies.

All of these studies, including the latest on tool use, are published in journals, and news releases are sent out, and science bloggers chat online about them, but in the end, what difference does it make to rats?

Rats and mice, that other unfairly maligned species, are still used and killed by the tens of millions in U.S. laboratories every year. They are denied even the minimal coverage of the Animal Welfare Act, the only federal law offering any sort of protection to animals in laboratories.

So while it may pique the curiosity of some that rats can be taught to use tools, the more interesting result of this and all the studies that came before it is that experimenters apparently can't be taught to put the results of studies to good use. If experimenters had this ability - the sort of reasoning that should get one from A to B in a logical way - they'd read the evidence that rats can think, learn, feel, laugh, act altruistically and risk their lives for others, and they'd stop caging and hurting them in laboratories.

When a person knows that another being can suffer, and yet deliberately sets about causing that suffering, shouldn't we worry less about which species can use tools, and more about the callousness of some people?

Proving once again that the folks in our Factory-Farming Campaigns Department are just brimming with so much compassion it could make you sick, they've just extended an offer to help our archenemy, KFC, deal with its apparent rodent problem. After video footage of a KFC in Greenwich Village that was overrun by rats on Friday went just about everywhere on the Internet, PETA sent a letter to the eatery’s owner, offering to help him implement a humane rodent-control program at his restaurant. Here's what PETA VP Bruce Friedrich had to say about the incident:

“This store’s lethal attempt to deal with rodents has failed miserably. Although KFC refuses to work with us toward minimizing the suffering of the hundreds of millions of birds killed for its restaurants every year, we hope that this store owner will work with us on a safe, effective, and humane solution to the rat infestation.”

Honestly, all this turning the other cheek and being nice to our enemies has me reeling. I'd go over to the other side of the office right now and congratulate our Factory-Farming Campaigns Department, but I'm worried that I'd be bowled over by all the excess compassion floating around. Here's PETA's letter to the store.

Awww, look at all the adorable rats! In other, extremely important news, KFC is really, really disgusting.

This video puts PETA in a bit of a difficult position, because we wouldn’t want to actively encourage other impressionable rats to eat at KFC—both for their own health and because of the ethical issues involved—but the restaurant does seem to be quite a favorite among rodents. Check it out: