Our Fact vs. Myth information is a collaborative project between several people and a continual work in progress. Stay tuned as we continue to expand, update, and revise this section to dispel other common myths perpetuated by the vivisection industry and their representative lobbyists.
As a result of lobbying on the part of the vivisection industry, local and state animal cruelty laws frequently contain an explicit exemption for animals used in research. This means it is impossible to be charged in those states with animal cruelty, even if the abuse matches the letter of the law, if the animal is being used in scientific research.
Even before such exemptions had been carved out, state appellate court decisions have overturned jury convictions of animal researchers receiving federal funding. In 1983, Edward Taub was convicted by a jury of his peers under Maryland's animal cruelty statute for his horrific treatment and criminal neglect of the Silver Springs Monkeys.1 Following the conviction, the research community rallied to his defense and his conviction was overturned on appeal. In its decision, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that researchers receiving federal funding from the NIH are excluded from the state's animal cruelty laws, although no such exemption was explicitly granted in the statute.2 The Court, in part, found that the existence of federal regulations governing the use of animals in research removed the treatment of research animals from the state’s jurisdiction. This made it impossible for a state to gainsay the federal rulings on treatment of animals and initiate their own prosecution. So the existence of federal animal welfare laws, that the industry likes to claim help protect animals in labs, actually served to immunize an animal researcher from accountability.
In the 25+ years since this court decision, no state has successfully prosecuted an animal researcher for animal cruelty or neglect,3 despite numerous undercover investigations in labs across the country that have demonstrated shocking scenes of even the most gratuitous animal abuse.
Since the first laboratory animal welfare legislation was proposed in the 1960s, the animal research industry has vigorously opposed even the most minimal animal welfare reforms and regulations on their practices. When they could not stop legislation from being passed, they continued to lobby for weak agency regulations, lax enforcement, and, most recently, weakening through legislative amendment.4 Now, after all their efforts fighting any oversight whatsoever of animal experimentation, the industry conveniently uses these regulations as a smokescreen to assure the public that all is well within their labs.
In fact, the only existing federal laws covering the use of animals in research, the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and the NIH-administered Health Research Extension Act5, are abject and demonstrable failures. These federal laws are so riddled with loopholes, exemptions, and soft penalties that laboratories can essentially carry on with business-as-usual without any real fear of reprisal for their actions. On top of this, the enforcement of this law is so crude that tiny watchdog grassroots organizations, often operating out of a concerned individual's home, often do more to uncover and expose lawbreakers than the federal agency delegated with the task of enforcing the law and endowed with millions of dollars for this purpose.
If federal laws and regulations ensured humane treatment of animals inside labs, we wouldn't have seen the shocking images or read the disturbing reports from animal laboratories such as the Oregon National Primate Research Center, Huntingdon Life Sciences, Covance Laboratories, University of North Carolina, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, University of California-Davis, New Iberia Research Center, University of Florida, University of Utah, University of Nevada-Reno, Columbia University, University of Connecticut... and so many others. There is no proof as powerful as empirical proof, and the empirical evidence clearly demonstrates year after year that animals are continuing to needlessly suffer inside laboratories.
For decades, the United States government, at the behest of the vivisection industry, refused to enforce the law as it was written and excluded regulation of practices involving rats, mice, and birds used in research. Finally, in 2000, this lax enforcement was to be brought to an end after successful litigation from animal rights groups compelled the USDA to announce it would begin monitoring the use of these previously ignored species. The vivisection lobbyist and public relations organizations, the same organizations that tell the public not to be concerned with the treatment of animals in labs precisely because laws protect them, began fighting to have the law specifically exclude purpose-bred rats, mice, and birds.
Multi-million dollar corporations and research institutions have greater control over Washington than animal protection organizations, so their lobbying efforts inevitably succeeded. In 2002, Senator Jesse Helms attached a provision to the guaranteed-to-pass farm subsidies bill that amended the AWA to redefine "animal". Today, the AWA defines animal as:
"any live or dead dog, cat, monkey (nonhuman primate mammal), guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or such other warm-blooded animal, as the Secretary may determine is being used, or is intended for use, for research, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet; but such term excludes (1) birds, rats of the genus Rattus, and mice of the genus Mus, bred for use in research..."
When spelling out the requirements for research institutions in Section 2143 of the Act, an introductory clause states that:
Nothing in this chapter... shall be construed as authorizing the Secretary to promulgate rules, regulations, or orders with regard to the design, outlines, or guidelines of actual research or experimentation by a research facility as determined by such research facility;
So while the Act concerns itself with things such as the housing, feeding, watering, procurement, and transport of animals (except for the 95% of animals that don't count as 'animals'), the actual nature of the experiment or research is completely unregulated by the Animal Welfare Act. When President Lyndon Johnson originally signed the Act into law in 1966, he captured the spirit of this when he stated "[This] bill does not authorize any sort of interference with actual research or experimentation." This explains why, in our nation's laboratories, monkeys may lawfully have their penises shocked to provide semen samples, cats and primates may lawfully have their eyes sutured shut, and dogs lawfully may have their hearts shocked until they go into cardiac arrest. These procedures are all part of the actual experimental design and the AWA does not empower the government to interfere with actual research projects approved by the research facility’s IACUC. In other words, there is no such thing as an illegal experiment.
In 1985, as a result of national outrage in response to horrific cruelty uncovered at a primate lab in Silver Spring, Maryland and the Head Injury Clinic in Pennsylvania, the Animal Welfare Act was amended requiring all institutions carrying out animal research to have an IACUC. Each IACUC would review and approve (or, at least theoretically, reject) research proposals before they could apply for federal funding. The Act states that each IACUC must have at least three members, one of which must be a veterinarian and one an individual unaffiliated with the research community to represent the voice of the public.
While the AWA requires that a minimum of three members serve on IACUCs, it provides for no maximum size. This is convenient because IACUCs vote on approval for research proposals on a majority basis, and the public constituency on the IACUC need never exceed one single person. So for example, if an IACUC has twelve members on it, and only one member from the public (this is a common scenario), the public's vote is represented with roughly 8% of the vote in a majority-rules format. This is a vanishingly insignificant role the public plays on IACUCs. And if that tribune of the public ruffles too many feathers or represents too dangerous an ideology, they are simply removed by the institution or by other members of the committee and replaced with a more complacent and acquiescent representative. Melinda Fox, a former IACUC member and animal advocate learned this the hard way when she was removed from an IACUC, despite years of professional and studious conduct, merely for attending an animal rights conference.6
Aside from this "public representative" handpicked by the lab, the other 92% that make up the IACUC are individuals associated with or employed by the research institution; often they are other vivisectors. Typically anxious to ensure that their own research projects are approved, these insiders are unlikely to set too critical or investigative a tone for the committee's conduct. Experience has proven that it is rare that an IACUC refuses to approve a researcher’s proposed use of animals.7
The only unbiased review of the IACUC system, conducted by researchers Scott Plous and Harold Herzog and published in scientific journal Science,8 determined that the IACUCs were unreliable and inconsistent in their determinations. Plous and Herzog, using a blind method, asked different IACUCs to assess the same and already approved research proposals. The differing conclusions reached by different IACUCs demonstrated that no comprehensive or sensible methodology underlies determinations made by the committees. In the press release announcing the publication of the study9, Herzog stated, "if the reliability of their proposal reviews is at chance levels -- literally, a coin toss -- then the review system needs to be fixed."
President Richard Nixon once famously declared that "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal." Similarly, when an IACUC approves a research or husbandry practice, that means it is no longer illegal. If the USDA inspects a lab and finds a violation of the Animal Welfare Act, the lab may furnish a document demonstrating that the IACUC or lab veterinarian put their stamp of approval on the "exemption" to the law. At that point, the USDA is then unable to issue a citation or warning for the clear violation. For example, in one year, the University of Wisconsin's IACUC allowed 27 separate research protocols involving food or water deprivation (affecting 1297 primates, 160 hamsters, 150 squirrels, 120 sheep, 70 cats, and 60 dogs), thus violating the Act's provision that animals be regularly provided food and water. The same year, the IACUC approved 7 research protocols to ignore statutes requiring regular cleaning/sanitization of cages, 11 protocols involving harmful restraint, and a staggering 38 protocols to ignore statutes requiring psychological well-being programs for primates (this allowed over a thousand primates to be housed in isolation).10
USDA inspectors, while sometimes well-intended individuals with an overwhelming workload, are largely impotent to stop egregious cruelty occurring in the labs. Dr. Isis Johnson-Brown, a former USDA inspector whose territory included the entire state of Oregon, came forward as a whistleblower in the wake of a 2000 undercover investigation of the Oregon National Primate Research Center. She provided a statement that succinctly summed up the frustrations facing even USDA inspectors to work with the few available tools at their disposal to stop poor laboratory practices:
While working for the United States Department of Agriculture as the inspector in Oregon for the Federal Animal Welfare Act, I was dedicated to providing the animals the protections, minimal as they are, that are stipulated by law. This is no easy task....If that wasn’t enough, I soon found out that my own supervisors were working against me at every turn...my own supervisors were disappointed and unsupportive of my efforts to simply enforce the bare minimum standards in the Code of Federal Regulations. The USDA has a good ol’ boy relationship with the research industry and the laws are nothing more than smoke and mirrors. More than once, I was instructed by a supervisor to make a personal list of violations of the law, cut that list in half, and then cut that list in half again before writing up my inspection reports. My willingness to uphold the law during my site visits at the Primate Center led to me being “retrained” several times by higher-ups in the USDA...The USDA has little motivation to enforce the already weak laws of the Animal Welfare Act. I was unable to do my job and eventually, out of frustration, I had to quit. I recognize the system is not set up to protect the animals but instead the financial interests of the research labs.
Her statement is worth reading in its entirety.11 It provides several typical examples where the research facility is allowed to escape accountability for their poor treatment of animals due to the prevalence of loopholes in the law and a lack of vigor on the part of the USDA to pursue lawbreakers.
Often, video, pictures, or documents surface from inside of labs that shock and outrage the public. The evidence typically shows acts of cruelty or severe negligence that result in substantial unnecessary animal suffering. Yet, in many of these cases, the labs are able to correctly point out that the USDA has cleared their laboratory of wrongdoing. In most other cases, labs frequently escape with only a warning, giving the public the impression that their infractions were insignificant. However, the failure of the USDA to punish abusers does not actually prove that their conduct was permissible or tolerable - it only demonstrates the weakness of current animal protection laws that have been established and tailored to allow laboratories to continue with business-as-usual. Consider the following examples among many:
In October 2008, PETA filed a complaint with the USDA as a result of abusive and negligent treatment of primates at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) that was exposed during their undercover investigation that took place earlier that year. Photos and videos show clearly terrified and suffering primates at ONPRC. However, though the USDA acknowledged that ONPRC violated federal law on at least three occasions, it failed to take any punitive action beyond a warning.12
In November 2007, a laboratory in Everett, Washington known as SNBL boiled a monkey alive when an absent-minded technician sent a cage through an automated cage washer with the monkey still inside. The USDA later issued a ruling that declared that this did not constitute a violation of the AWA. They refused to levy any punishment against SNBL - even a nominal fine - because SNBL provided the USDA with written assurances that they would try to ensure that such an act not occur in the future.13
On January 10, 2007, a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic induced an aneurysm in a dog that resulted in the dog's death. The dog was being used to demonstrate a medical device to a group of salespeople. The doctor solicited use of the dog without reporting that his intended use was to be for a demonstration of a commercial product. The USDA issued only a warning in this case.14
In the summer of 2001, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, a monkey was strangled by a loose chain in his/her cage. Soon after, a chimpanzee named Sellers was found dead with his head wedged between the bed board and the back of the cage wall. The USDA issued a warning for these two instances and levied no penalty against Yerkes.15
Since the AWA was amended in 1985, the federal government has conducted an audit every ten years to review the effectiveness of the Animal Care oversight system at USDA/APHIS. All three of these audits have exposed serious deficiencies in the animal care system, yet no changes have been adopted to accommodate their recommendations. The Washington Post discussed the 1985 General Accounting Office audit:
The report found that the department's inspections of research labs and kennels varied widely in the six states that were surveyed. Inspections averaged about two a year for facilities in Iowa and Kansas, but less than once a year for those in California. About half of the facilities in California and New York were never inspected, the report found.16
The 1995 audit, conducted by the Inspector General of the United States Department of Agriculture, was no more favorable:
APHIS does not have the authority, under current legislation, to effectively enforce the requirements of the Animal Welfare Act. For instance, the Agency cannot terminate or refuse to renew licenses or registrations in cases where serious or repeat violations occur... Monetary penalties were not always aggressively collected and were in some cases arbitrarily reduced. APHIS also generally accommodated facility operators who routinely refused APHIS inspectors access to their facilities...In addition, APHIS cannot assess monetary penalties for violations unless the violator agrees to pay them, and penalties are often so low that violators regard them merely as part of the cost of doing business... As a result, facilities had little incentive to comply with the requirements of the Act.17
The report also criticized the law for lacking an effective enforcement mechanism to ensure that research facilities were not procuring animals from local shelters or pounds that could be someone's unclaimed pet.
The most recent audit by the Inspector General's office was released in 2005. Their findings sound awfully familiar:
Some IACUCs are not effectively monitoring animal care activities or reviewing protocols. During FYs 2002 through 2004, the number of research facilities cited for violations of the AWA has steadily increased from 463 to 600 facilities. Most VMOs believe there are still problems with the search for alternative research, veterinary care, review of painful procedures, and the researchers’ use of animals. Discounted stipulated fines assessed against violators of the AWA are usually minimal. Under current APHIS policy, AC offers a 75-percent discount on stipulated fines4 as an incentive for violators to settle out of court to avoid attorney and court costs. In addition to giving the discount, we found that APHIS offered other concessions to violators, lowering the actual amount paid to a fraction of the original assessment. An IES official told us that as a result, violators consider the monetary stipulation as a normal cost of conducting business rather than a deterrent for violating the law.18
The report went on to fault the Animal Care enforcement system for several other reasons. These include lack of diligent enforcement, inconsistency from one region of the country to another, tendency for USDA inspectors to reduce the number of actual of violations as a concession or accommodation to the research facility, and a misreporting of the numbers of animals used by research facilities.
MYTH: Laboratories must have a written assurance of compliance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals to receive federal funds. This written assurance ensures that only the highest standards of animal care and humane treatment are employed at labs receiving public funds.
The written assurance that a research facility must send to the NIH to conduct federally-funded research is nothing more than a promise from the institution that it will adhere to the recommendations in The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and comply with all laws and practices regarding laboratory animal care. First, as we have already seen, these standards and laws are so weak and minimal that they provide sufficient leeway for research facilities to cause harm their animals in terrible ways and still be within the law. Anyone concerned about the well-being of animals in labs should not feel reassured by knowing that the lab has only promised to comply with these abysmally minimal laws and standards.
But the NIH assurance has proven to be an ineffective method of deterring labs from violating even these most minimal of welfare laws. This is born out by the fact that additional oversight has been deemed necessary by other federal and private agencies and that public complaint is considered of utmost importance to successful enforcement of welfare regulations.19 It is also a matter of public record that many universities and research institutions around the country continue to be found in violation of the law year after year, and nearly all of them have filed a letter of assurance with the NIH. That the "Assurance Document" does not deter a research facility from breaking the law should surprise no one; as it is nothing more than the research facility's "word" that it won't break the law.
AAALAC was originally formed in 1965 by over a dozen trustee representative organizations, including the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, the American Medical Association, and the National Society for Medical Research (now the pro-vivisection propaganda organization NABR). For a fee ranging from $100-$1,000, a representative from AAALAC would make a site visit and would give the institution accreditation for five years before requiring another site visit. AAALAC was originally formed in 1965 as Congress was debating the first piece of federal animal welfare legislation that would cover laboratory animals in our nation's history. The vivisection industry hoped that by forming AAALAC, an organization masquerading as an independent oversight entity but still tightly controlled by the industry, they could dissuade the government from setting up the first truly public oversight of vivisection. Little has changed with AAALAC to date.20
AAALAC certifies animal research facilities every three years so long as the institution pays membership dues and complies with an announced and scheduled inspection. Nearly all animal labs of moderate size are AAALAC accredited in the U.S.21
AAALAC certification has not proven to be a reason for citizens to be complacent about the care that animals receive in vivisection laboratories. For example the University of Florida has been AAALAC accredited since 1966 according to an article in the Sunday, March 26, 2000 Gainesville Sun. In spite of this, dire conditions within the University of Florida's laboratories led to repeated complaints by senior staff that eventually led to the removal of the university's director of Animal Resources. The Associate Director of Animal Resources is quoted as saying, "This information, if put in the public domain, will do much more than expose a poorly run laboratory animal medicine program, it will be used to show what the real 'behind the scenes' may look like in our modern biomedical research facility."22
More recently, the nation's premier biomedical laboratory, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), AAALAC certified since 1967, was discovered to have essentially no ongoing or meaningful oversight.23 The notorious animal laboratory Huntingdon Life Sciences failed to lose its accreditation when its employees were caught on camera dissecting monkeys alive and punching beagle puppies in the face.24 Covance retains its accreditation despite numerous undercover investigations that have uncovered similar gratuitous cruelty and employee neglect of primates.25 In fact, one is hard pressed to find an example of any lab anywhere losing its accreditation as a result of animal welfare violations or problems within its labs. If the standards of accreditation are so low that nearly any lab willing to pay dues can acquire and maintain accreditation, then AAALAC accreditation is an empty meaningless symbol.
Footnotes
1 See Kathy Snow Guillermo, Monkey Business: The Disturbing Case That Launched the Animal Rights Movement (National Press Books, 1993). PETA also has a video on the Silver Springs Monkeys case. 2 Taub v. State of Maryland; 296 Md. 439 (Md.,1983). Decision can be found here. 3 There was however at least one other attempt to prosecute animal researchers, employees of a chimpanzee lab in New Mexico owned and operated by Charles River Laboratories, under a state animal cruelty law. Unfortunately, the judge dismissed the case despite clear negligent behavior due to an exemption in New Mexico's animal cruelty statute for practices administered under the care of a veterinarian. Related Articles.
4 For more background information on the history of the vivisection industry to resist and coopt outside oversight and regulations, see essay by Jeremy Beckham, Robber Barons and Vivisectors. 5 Full text of these federal laws: AWA (.doc file), HREA. 6 For Melinda Fox's entire writeup on these events, click here. (pdf) 7 For example, the chair of the IACUC at the University of Utah testified in front a state government records committee that he could not recall a single instance that a proposal had been refused. Upon questioning, he also reluctantly revealed several other deficiencies in the IACUC system discussed earlier in this writing. Click here for meeting minutes of that committee hearing. (.doc file) 8Science 2001;293(5530): pp. 608 - 609. 9Press release. (pdf) 102005 IACUC Exceptions for the University of Wisconsin. (pdf) 11Statement of Dr. Isis Johnson-Brown, USDA whistleblower. 12NIH Incident Reports for ONPRC, PETA complaint, USDA warning letter (pdf files). Media Report. 13USDA Ruling on SNBL. 14 "Cleveland Clinic Warned Over Dog Death," Associated Press, February 6, 2007. 15USDA documents on Sellers and unnamed monkey killed at Yerkes. (pdf) 16 "Hill Watchdog Faults Animal Welfare;
Agriculture Dept.'s Law Enforcement Is Spotty, GAO Says," Washington Post, May 22, 1985. (pdf) 17Enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, Audit Report No. 33600-1-Ch.Office of the Inspector General, United States Department of Agriculture. 1995. (pdf) 18Audit Report APHIS Animal Care Program Inspection and Enforcement Activities. Office of Inspector General, Western Region, U.S. Department of Agriculture; Report No. 33002-3-SF; September 2005. (pdf) 19 See, for example, page 8 of the 2007 USDA/APHIS Animal Care Annual Report. The report states, "In addition to conducting routine inspections of licensed and registered facilities, AC personnel follow up on public complaints to determine whether regulated animals are receiving proper care. APHIS regards these activities as critical to successful enforcement of the AWA." 20 See note 4. The essay discusses the history of AAALAC as well. 21Full list of AAALAC accredited facilities. (external link) 22 "Animal Upkeep Faulted," by Carrie Miller, Gainesville-Sun, March 26, 2000. 23Letter from CDC to AAALAC concerning their animal care problems. CDC never lost accreditation. 24 Photos and information from HLS can be found at http://www.insidehls.com. For information on the international campaign to close HLS, see http://www.shac.net. Multiple HLS videos can be found on YouTube by searching "Huntingdon Life Sciences." 25
For photos, videos, and other information on PETA's undercover investigation of the Covance lab in Vienna, Virginia, see http://www.covancecruelty.com. The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) conducted a separate investigation at Covance's facility in Germany. Covance won court battles banning the distribution of the undercover video by BUAV (hm, wonder why Covance is ashamed to have the public look in their labs?). You can still find the footage from the German facility at PETA's site at http://www.peta.org/feat/covance.
August 18, 2009
Several news updates on our main page recently. Stay tuned for an extensive update coming by the end of this month with more detailed information on many labs and vivisectors.
Friday July 31, 2009
A new and improved photo & video gallery is now on our site. The new gallery features newer photos at higher res, more photos, and the ability for users to submit comments/questions. If you have any photos we don't, we'd love to add them to our collection. If you have any protest pictures, send those in too, as we're currently working on a "protests" photo collection as well to compliment our "vivisection" collection.
Sunday July 26, 2009
New/updated information for vivisectors in several states: CO, CT, DE, DC, FL, GA, HI, TX, TN, SD, SC, RI.
Monday July 20, 2009 Fact vs. Myth section now up. Stay tuned as we debunk more myths on other topics in the coming weeks and months.
Tuesday July 14, 2009
New/updated information for vivisectors in AL, AZ, UT, VA, WA, WI.
Monday July 13, 2009
New essay, "How Like Us Need They Be?," by Rick Bogle, added to the essays section.
Wednesday July 8, 2009
More information added for Emory University, home to Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
Monday July 6, 2009 Two news articles and commentary posted regarding court settlement entered by USDA that states they must post facility reports of vivisection online for public access.
