PrimateLabs.com

Gene Sackett: Animal Abuser.

Rick Bogle — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:34:59 +0000

Originally appeared in Primate Freedom’s blog.

The effect of experience on the development of tactual-visual transfer in pigtailed macaque monkeys. Batterson VG, Rose SA, Yonas A, Grant KS, Sackett GP. Department of Comparative Medicine, Center on Human Development and Disability, Washington National Primate Research Center, University of Washington, WA, USA. Dev Psychobiol. 2008:

The study described here is the first to experimentally demonstrate the effects of experience on the development of tactual-visual transfer. Infant pigtailed macaque monkeys (Macaca nemestrina) were reared from birth to 2 months of age in special cages that allowed the separation of tactual and visual experience. When assessed on a battery of measures at the end of the 2-month period, animals reared without the opportunity to integrate information across the two sensory modalities performed at chance levels on a paired-comparison measure of tactual-visual transfer and performed worse than controls in a visually guided reaching task. (My emphasis.)

No it’s not (as if it would have been less meaningless if it had been.) Consider this:

Infant macaques were reared from birth in an apparatus which precluded sight of their body parts. At 35 days postpartum one hand was exposed to view. Visual fixation of this hand was insistent and prolonged; visually guided reaching was poor, but it improved during ten succeeding hours of exposure. Little concomitant improvement occurred in the reaching of the unexposed hand. Visually guided reaching in infant monkeys after restricted rearing. Held R, Bauer JA Jr. Science. 1967

Here’s an image from Held and Bauer:

Sackett (and here) was one of Harlow’s many students. He went on to become the director of the University of Washington’s NIH National Primate Research Center’s Infant Primate Research Laboratory. He’s now a Professor Emeritus and still has access to young monkeys.

His 2008 paper is another piece of evidence putting the lie to the vivisectors’ claims that only important non-redundant research is ever conducted. His 2008 paper is unimportant and redundant. The redundancy is particularly evident. Sackett was writing about the effects of various degrees of isolation rearing in the mid 1960s. If he didn’t read the Held and Bauer 1967 Science article, then he wasn’t well informed or staying up-to-date in his chosen area of deviance. If he did read it, but forgot about it, then he must not have done a legitimate literature search prior to embarking on the torment leading up to his 2008 paper. And if he did read it and remembered it or found it during a literature search, then he’s just a liar.

And so too, must be his co-authors.

Today, Sackett is still up to no good. He has a project titled CHRONIC ATYPICAL NEUROLEPTIC TREATMENT IN NORMALLY DEVELOPING MACACA NEMESTRINA, which he describes like this:

Atypical neuroleptic drugs are being used frequently in children and adolescents with severe psychopathology. The effects of these agents on normal growth and development are unknown. This 5-year project treats normally developing non-human primates (M. nemestrina) with risperidone, quetiapine, or placebo from 13-20 months of age, followed by a 4 month post-drug period. 10 males received a low dose of risperidone or quetiapine for 4 months, then switched to a high dose for 4 months. 20 males will be assigned to the placebo condition. Animals are tested before, during, and after drug or placebo treatment for (1) social, emotional, exploratory, learning and memory, motor skill, and perceptual behavior; and (2) physical assessments of health, somatic growth, bone mineralization, and hormonal function. The study design permits both between-group and within-individual comparisons to examine drug group differences as well as dose effects. Because M. nemestrina monkeys demonstrate psychological and somatic development comparable to humans, this project will identify aspects of human development that are likely to be affected by chronic treatment with these agents.

In fact, children undergoing treatment with atypical neuroleptic drugs are the subject of much study. The potential lon-term and lasting effects of these drugs on children will be discovered by studying the children taking them, not pig-tailed macaques (M. nemestrina). The design of Sackett’s research will provide no meaninful comparison between monkeys and humans.

University of California at Irvine: Liars. Michael Selsted: Vivisector.

PrimateLabs.com — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:25:45 +0000

In July of this year, three vehicles belonging to University of California researcher Michael Selsted were vandalized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) as they sat parked in front of his home. As often happens after an ALF action, this led to renewed media interest in the controversy surrounding animal experimentation. However, some of the articles have been run containing false, misleading, and deceptive statements from UC-Irvine administrators. Anyone who has been involved in the fight to expose and stop the cruel use of primates in laboratories should not be the least bit surprised that the abusers are again lying to the media and the public to hide their cruelty. It fits a pattern that goes back to at least the Silver Spring monkeys case.

We want to take the time here to correct these lies. Let’s look at the claims made by UCI officials that appeared in an article in the University of California’s student newspaper.

According to Fabian [Melanie Fabian, member of UCI's IACUC], the reason for the recent actions may have been a Web site called Primatelabs.com. On the Web site, which is an anti-primate-vivisection awareness site, anyone can look up a research facility such as UCI and see which researchers are doing testing on non-human primates.

The site currently lists not only Selsted, but also UCI researchers Jogesh Mukherjee and Andre Ouellette. The problem with the information given is that according to the IACUC, UCI does not do testing on non-human primates.

This is a highly misleading statement coming from UCI. The reader is left with the impression that we here at PrimateLabs.com are bumbling fools that have passed on completely false information. This is not the case.

While it does indeed appear that University of California Irvine doesn’t house any monkeys at their own facilities, these three researchers still listed UC-Irvine as their affiliated institution when they applied for grant money. Thus, like all NIH-grants, UC-Irvine will get to skim off a sizable chunk of that grant money, typically approaching 50%, for their own general budget. So while UC-Irvine is eager to wash their hands clean of the moral blight that is primate vivisection, they don’t seem too eager to reject money off the backs of monkeys abused elsewhere at the behest of their faculty. To make their statement more accurate, a sentence should have been added at the end of the second paragraph: “We only profit from it.”

It is particularly misleading that Fabian, as administrator of the UCI IACUC, would make this statement. Typically, even if the researcher’s research proposal uses animals housed elsewhere, their institution’s IACUC must still look at the grant and approve it. This is supported by the fact that the UCI IACUC protocol application has an “Appendix H” that reads “Non-UCI Research/Housing Locations,” which a researcher must fill out if any live-animal procedures will take place at a non-UCI site. When she made this statement to the media, Fabian likely knew that Selsted and Mukherjee use primates, and even knew where their victims are housed. But she lied through omission by carefully crafting her words to leave the reader with the impression that no UCI faculty member uses primates. Even the reporter was left with this impression, as she introduced her sentence by saying “the problem with the information given is that…” There was and is no problem with the information given.

To be clear, Selsted, despite numerous assertions to the contrary here and elsewhere, is clearly a primate vivisector by any definition of the word. Selsted is researching why saliva in older monkeys is able to prevent SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) infection but not in neonates. Much of his research does involve the use of cell cultures rather than living animals. However, his research is carried out with the ultimate aim of trying out experimental microbicides containing defensin in the oral cavities of baby monkeys. His grant listed on this site, “Molecular Ontogeny of Oral Mucosal Resistance to SIV” (NIH grant number 5R01DE015517), states that its last aim is to “determine whether exogenous, topically administered defensin can alter the susceptibility to infection of neonatal rhesus macaques.”

In addition to this, as recently as three months ago, Selsted was involved in a related project at the Southwest National Primate Research Center that not only used primates, but actually harmed humans’ closest living relatives, chimpanzees. This project was funded with money from SNPRC’s base grant (grant number 2P51RR013986-10) so it is fair to say that UCI had nothing to do with this study. Nevertheless, remember Selsted’s personal vehicles were the ones damaged, and he clearly has individual responsibility for this study that was carried out in San Antonio. This subproject uses chimpanzees as test tubes in order determine the toxicity of an experimental theta defensin. The sub project’s abstract (ID# 6273) reads:

“Theta defensins are host defense peptides produced in the white blood cells of Old World monkeys (but not in chimpanzees or humans; see references below). In experiments performed in mice and rats, theta defensins facilitate clearance of bacteria in experimental infections, and also profoundly reduce the lethal effects of systemic inflammation (severe sepsis). Our long term goal is to determine the suitability of theta defensins as human therapeutics. Two adult chimpanzees will receive graded (increasing), intravenously administered doses of a naturally occurring theta-defensin RTD-1). The goal of these experiments are 1) to determine if there is any acute or subacute toxicity associated with the treatment, 2) to determine whether the administered protein elicits an antibody response in the chimpanzees, and 3) to determine whether other immunologic mediators (cytokines) are affected by the treatments.”

In 2008, this sub project was funded by the National Center for Research Resources in the amount of $306,788 and lists Selsted as the lead researcher. All of this information can be verified with the NIH’s new RePORTER tool.

There is something very odd about Selsted trying to deny that he is a primate vivisector. It seems that Selsted himself knows that the use of primates in experimentation is ethically dubious and he is trying to either internally rationalize his own participation in cruelty or hide it so that others can’t know the suffering he causes. If the moral and scientific case for experimenting on primates can be presented, why not simply do so instead of denying one’s role in it? Selsted is clearly acting like someone who is ashamed of his actions.

Let’s continue with the article:

The IACUC committee that Fabian works for was created to prevent this torture. When a researcher wants to use animals in a project, they must fill out an application or “protocol” which contains an extremely detailed description of what they plan to use the animals for. In the protocol they must justify the number of animals needed using statistics and state what their plans are from beginning to end.

While it’s good to see the article use the word “torture” used in the context of animal experimentation, even to deny it in a roundabout way, this statement on the whole is not very good reporting.
At a bare minimum, there is substantial controversy surrounding the effectiveness of IACUCs to prevent animal suffering. The only truly independent and scientific surveys of the system have shown substantial deficiencies. Speaking with any experienced anti-vivisection activist will also surely uncover several anecdotes where the IACUC system has failed to protect animals and has instead worked to protect the interests of the researchers. None of this was mentioned by the article. (For more information on the problems with IACUCs, see our Fact vs. Myth on this subject).

“It is really frustrating,” Fabian said, “because I know how well cared for these animals are and I’m an animal lover myself with two dogs and two cats at home. Everybody involved in the use of animals in science cares about the welfare of those animals.”

The fact that Fabian shares her home with animals, animals that she probably does genuinely care for and love, says nothing about how she views the animals trapped in UCI’s laboratories. To mention both in the same breath is a misleading attempt to subtly conflate the two in the public mind – to give the impression that animals in labs are treated as well as those in our homes.

Fairly recently, UCI has infected the eyes of 20 rabbits with the Herpes virus and intentionally left them untreated. They admit that this will cause extreme pain to the animal but they did not apply available topical drugs because this would “interfere with the experimental infection and adversely affect the study results…In particular, the ability to accurately measure the amount of virus in the eye at different time points after infection would be compromised by standard medical therapies.” (See related USDA documents). Hopefully, Ms. Fabian would not leave eye sores untreated in her dogs/cats at home out of a curiosity to see how the virus develops. But I don’t think she would. Fabian’s ethical beliefs surrounding treatment of animals are probably marked by a great deal of cognitive dissonance that allow her to condone one treatment of animals in labs and another treatment of pets at home.

It is a plain matter of fact that people are perfectly capable of horribly mistreating one group of individuals and caring a great deal for another group. The prison guards at Abu Ghraib and the CIA torture prisons likely came from homes in the U.S. where they expressed a great deal of compassion and care for their family members or larger community. The same Nazi doctors who used child prisoners at Auschwitz in harmful experiments often had children themselves that were loved at home. In Fabian’s case, she is approving research projects on dogs and cats at UCI that if someone were to treat her own animals in such a way, she would likely call the police and request that animal cruelty charges be filed.

“A lot of the information that those anti-animal research sites put on their websites is so out of date. It’s from around the mid-1970s. Sure these animals go through some pain but it’s minimized as much as possible. Nobody wants to hurt animals and it’s frustrating to see scientists singled out when they are working toward cures for diseases that we could die from someday.”

Fabian’s claim that anti-vivisection activists use information from around the mid-1970s is absolutely false. I’m not even sure how she arrived at that date. PETA, the largest animal rights organization in the world and the U.S., wasn’t even founded until the early 1980s. The first undercover investigations/raids on vivisection labs in the U.S. began around the early 1980s as well. Perhaps she chose this date because Peter Singer’s first edition of Animal Liberation was published in 1975. Who knows. Anyone’s guess is as good as ours.

Regardless, the claim is false. You will find no grant for any vivisector on our website older than 2007. The vast majority of our photos in our photo gallery were taken from undercover investigations that occurred in this decade, and most in the past few years. And this site is no exception – there are plenty of excellent animal rights websites that have continually updated information on the use of primates in laboratories. Stop Animal Exploitation Now, for example, has thousands and thousands of pages of documents from inside animal labs – none of which are from the mid-1970s. Animal activists continually seek out the newest information and photos possible. This is evidenced by the fact that animal protection organizations, including PETA and HSUS, make continual efforts to conduct new undercover investigations inside primate laboratories. HSUS’ investigation into New Iberia, which garnered substantial media attention, was less than a year ago. Surely Fabian is aware of this, and I suspect her lab still checks potential new hires for any connections to animal rights groups for fear of an undercover investigation in their own facilities. That doesn’t sound like a movement that is comfortable using information from the mid-1970s. (And, of course, if Fabian or anyone else would like to provide us with up-to-date photos or documents from inside UC-Irvine, we’d be happy to post them here. Just email us your pictures and information at info@primatelabs.com. No matter what lab you work at, even if you have only a few pics you quickly took with your cell phone camera, we’d love to have ‘em).

Commentary: Laboratory Animal Veterinarians

Rick Bogle — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:23:06 +0000

Originally appeared at Primate Freedom’s blog.

So-called lab animal vets must rank at lowest level of any ethical scale of human behavior. Like MDs who worked to keep people alive so that they could be experimented on in a Nazi death camp, or kept them alive during the experiments, it’s very hard to even invent a more disturbing ethical scenario.

The lead news story in the August 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Association (JAVMA) is titled “Primate veterinarians promote animal welfare, biomedical research: One-health approach bridges gap between science and human medicine.”

It’s crap-filled propaganda. It’s hard to say who the intended audience is, but whoever they might be, the author must think they are dullards and easy marks. No one with even a smattering of critical thinking ability could actually believe what is being passed off as factual, actual, or rational. If AVMA believes that this is the sort of crap that will coax young vets just beginning their careers into the dark secret world of vivisection, then it explains the quality of the vets we see there already.

Sick, sick, sick.

AVMA journals > JAVMA News > Animal welfare

August 15, 2009
avmainfo@avma.org

Primate veterinarians promote animal welfare, biomedical research
One-health approach bridges gap between science and human medicine

When reports surfaced earlier this year that some primates at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana had been mistreated, some people may have seen it as confirmation of their worst suspicions about laboratory animal research.

The Humane Society of the United States, which secretly videotaped alleged abuses, accused New Iberia staff of hundreds of Animal Welfare Act violations. A U.S. Department of Agriculture investigation of the facility ultimately resulted in just six citations for failing to comply with AWA standards. Meanwhile, the HSUS called on Congress to pass legislation ending invasive research on chimpanzees and retiring the approximately 500 federally owned chimpanzees to sanctuaries.

“just six citations”

Why didn’t JAVMA include a link to the USDA Inspection report? The HSUS complaint included hundreds of aledged violations; the fact that USDA cited New Iberia for six violations, serious violations, suggests three possibilities: HSUS was making up violations; New Iberia cleaned up their act before USDA showed up; USDA cited NIRC for the minimum number of violations possible, in effect, colluding with the lab. Given the fact that USDA hadn’t noted any of the problems previously and did so only after videos documenting the abuse were made public tends to make me lean more strongly toward the last two possibilities.

The controversy over New Iberia illustrates a key challenge for those working in laboratory animal medicine, namely, a perception that scientists systematically abuse their nonhuman subjects. The primate research community was deeply troubled by how they were portrayed by the media, and they sought to counter the negative image by explaining that the New Iberia incident is a rare exception in a field that is quite simply working to discover new drugs, vaccines, and medical technologies to save lives, both human and animal.

JAVMA doesn’t see the hypocracy in this statement. “The primate research community was deeply troubled by how they were portrayed by the media,” but said essentially nothing about the violations of the AWA. The only rare event was the undercover documentation that forced USDA to act.

The public rarely considers the need for animals in biomedical research, says Dr. Christian R. Abee, director of the Michael E. Keeling Center in Bastrop, Texas, but when they do, they quickly understand why animals are a valuable resource. “We’re really talking about the life and death of people,” Dr. Abee said. “The new treatments being worked on can save millions of lives. Just as the discovery of penicillin saved untold numbers of lives, we’re trying to discover the antibiotics for the future.”
“the life and death of people” This is just fear mongering.
What the public may also not realize is, when a medical advance is first tested in animals, veterinarians are there, ensuring that the animals are humanely treated and that the therapy is shown to be safe enough to begin clinical trials in humans.

This is nonsense. FDA decides whether a drug or therapy can proceed to human trials.

Veterinarians have sworn an oath to protect animal health and relieve suffering in their patients. Yet they are equally committed to promoting public health and advancing medical knowledge about animals as well as humans. The tension between these dual obligations is nowhere more profound than in the field of laboratory animal medicine.

Obviously, it’s a meaningless oath. Here it is:

Veterinarian’s Oath

(Adopted by the AVMA In November, 1999, reaffirmed April, 2004)

Being admitted to the profession of veterinary medicine, I solemnly swear to use my scientific knowledge and skills for the benefit of society through the protection of animal health, the relief of animal suffering, the conservation of animal resources, the promotion of public health, and the advancement of medical knowledge.

I will practice my profession conscientiously, with dignity, and in keeping with the principles of veterinary medical ethics.

I accept as a lifelong obligation the continual improvement of my professional knowledge and competence.

“the protection of animal health, the relief of animal suffering”

But veterinarians are in the forefront of making animals sick, hurting them, and killing them. The attending vet at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center in Madison, Saverio V. Capuano, for instance, has published a number of papers detailing the experimental infections of monkeys with SIV and tuberculosis. He, like thousands of vets involved in basic research, makes healthy animals sick, writes about their illness, and then kills them. And yet, AVMA believes that they are living up to their oath to protect animals and releive their suffering. Sick, sick, sick.

“We as veterinarians care about the animals,” Dr. Abee explained, “so we want to make certain they’re used properly and that we do everything we can to minimize any discomfort these animals have. But we also recognize that it’s only through this research that we’re going to make progress in treating diseases killing many millions of people every year.”

Unadulterated crap. No one who makes animals deathly ill, especially not someone who does so for financial gain, can be genuinely said to care about animals, at least not in the way that most people mean. Abee cares about animals because their agony pays his mortgage. And what arrogance: “it’s only through this research that we’re going to make progress in treating diseases killing many millions of people every year.” I suppose we ought to tell all the real doctors and real scientists studing human heath and biology in humans and human tissues and cells to close up shop, Abee is going to save the world.

Among the many animal species used in research, few are as highly valued physiologically as nonhuman primates. Because of their genetic, immunologic, reproductive, and neurologic similarities to humans, these animals are used as translational models involving a range of human illnesses, including cancer, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cardiovascular illnesses.

This is gibberish. Translational has become the buzz word of the day. These kooks believe the old chain of being model or scala naturae that posited a chain of being made up of links with God at the top most and descending step by step all the way down to the lowliest of creation. So, according to this prescientific world view, a monkey is just a step down from a man, a dog a step down from a monkey, then a cat, a rat, a mouse, etc. So, if a discovery is made in a mouse, then we can translate this discovery up the chain, modifying it intelligently as we go and, voila!, we come to a miracle drug for humans. Unfortunately, there is no such chain. Humans did not descend from monkeys. We have a common ancestor. The human line diverged from the monkey line many millions of years ago. We didn’t descend from chimpanzees. We have a common ancestor. The idea that nonhuman primates are a good translational model is just stupid. Which of the 230 some-odd species are the good translational species? The virus that kills macaques, SIV, was taken from mangebys, which aren’t bothered by it. Even something like Ketamine, the drug of choice in the primate labs to chemically restrain the animals requires differing doses for different primate species. Monkeys aren’t even good translational models for other monkey species.

Advocates of primate research say medical breakthroughs such as the polio and hepatitis B vaccines would not have been possible or realized as soon as they were if these animals were not part of the investigations. “Primates are as close as you can get to the next step, which is clinical trials in humans,” said Dr. Cheryl D. DiCarlo, assistant director of research resources at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio, Texas.

This contradicts Abee. DeCarlo seems to acknowledge that the animals weren’t really necessary after all. Her statement about speeding up breakthroughs is pure self-serving speculation.

Even with their many similarities to humans, a primate may not be ideal for a particular study, and it’s up to the veterinarian supervising the study to decide, Dr. DiCarlo noted. “That’s one of the things lab animal veterinarians do: they determine what species is the best model for a particular research project. Sometimes the mouse is the best model,” she said.

DiCcarlo must have hit her head against something hard in the past; veterinarians don’t decide which species to use in research, the Principal Investigator designs the research. Whether this person is a vet or not is entirely happenstance, but in any case, vets don’t make these decisions. For one thing, how would they know whether a part of the brain in a rat or a monkey will react more similarly to a human brain when injected with an investigational drug? If it’s an experiment, presumably no one knows.

Much of the research involving nonhuman primates is conducted at the eight National Primate Research Centers located throughout the country. Overseen by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Research Resources, those facilities house an estimated 28,000 animals representing more than 20 species, including Old World primates like the chimpanzee, baboon, and rhesus macaqueâ€”the lion’s share of primates used in researchâ€”and New World primates, including squirrel and owl monkeys. In addition, the centers operate breeding colonies to maintain the supply of several primate species for research.

Given the considerable costs associated with caring for a chimpanzee throughout its lifetimeâ€”as much as $500,000 over the span of 50 yearsâ€”the NCRR in 1995 suspended financial support for the breeding of new chimpanzees. The center does provide ongoing monies for chimpanzees bred prior to the moratorium, and that includes retirement into a federally funded sanctuary system, such as Chimp Haven in Shreveport, La.

Primates are highly complex and social animals so, in addition to a team of veterinarians and veterinary technicians, each center employs a staff of behaviorists or trainers whose sole job is to provide environmental enrichment for the animals. It is understood in the research community that healthy and emotionally well-adjusted animals make the best test subjects.

This is blather. In fact, the cause of the wide-spread self-mutilation and psychotic behaviors of the monkeys in the labs is a subspecialty of some primate researchers. The problem is ubiquitous.

Humans aren’t the only ones who benefit from new medical therapies. According to Dr. Franziska B. Grieder, director of the NCRR Comparative Medicine Division, many advances in human medicine are now used to enhance and prolong animal life.

Huh? Wait. So, we experiment on monkeys, find a cure for cancer, heal people, and then use the drug on dogs. Hello? Very, very few discoveries in monkeys have been successful in humans. Of those (in fact, I can’t think of even one) there aren’t many that have been put into clinical veterinary practice.

“We wouldn’t have specific cancer treatments if they weren’t first developed for human patientsâ€”or hip replacements or cardiac valves. We would never put those into dogs if they weren’t developed for humans,” Dr. Grieder said, and added that few biomedical companies would fund costly studies that benefited only animals.

Demand for primates fluctuates according to research needs at a given time. Research on HIV/AIDS, influenza, cancer treatments using monoclonal antibodies, and biodefense, for instance, are among some of the current hot topics. The NIH worries that new and emerging diseases will increase demand for research animals and there won’t be enough veterinarians to look after the animals properly.

No. Very very few cancer studies use monkeys, most flu studies use mice and ferrets. Biodefense is a Orwellian term used a code for bioweaponizing disease agents. The diseases under study as bioweapons are fairly broad spectrum in action and can kill a variety of species. Monkeys are used only because they are available and sexy.

As with most career paths in veterinary medicine, with the exception of companion animal practice, a shortage exists of specially trained veterinarians who can meet the behavioral and physiologic needs of primates. The Association of Primate Veterinarians has 374 members, 33 of whom reside outside the United States, according to APV president, Dr. Thomas E. Nolan. Those numbers, Dr. Nolan said, encompass most if not all veterinarians working with primates.

The silver lining here is that many vets are deciding to spend their careers trying to alleviate illness and suffering in companion animals as opposed to keeping animals in labs alive to be killed, or keeping cows and pigs healthy enough to have babies and be killed, or to keep jailed animals in zoos alive long enough to be gawked at.

“Primate medicine is a small [twisted, sick] fraternity, and (the fact) that jobs are going unfilled is pretty common knowledge,” explained Dr. Bruce J. Bernacky, section chief of the rhesus monkey breeding colony and co-manager of the chimp colony at the Michael E. Keeling Center. “NIH can also see that more veterinarians are retiring than young people are coming into field.”

To offset the shortage, the NCRR in 2007 began offering the R25 training grant at each of the primate centers to train veterinarians for careers in primate clinical medicine. Dr. Greg K. Wilkerson started his two-year residency at the Keeling Center in February. A 2001 graduate of the Center for Veterinary Health Sciences at Oklahoma State University, Dr. Wilkerson completed residencies in anatomic pathology and comparative medicine prior to striking out in this new direction.

“Primate medicine wasn’t something I initially considered, just because I didn’t have a lot of exposure to primates,” Dr. Wilkerson said. “But once I did, I found it very fascinating. No two days are the same, and there are many opportunities for me.”

The veterinarians interviewed for this article believe that, as champions of animal welfare, veterinarians are an essential component of biomedical research that uses animals. “We’re sometimes perceived as torturing animals, but it’s just the opposite. The veterinary staff is the animal advocate here,” explained Dr. Kathleen M. Brasky, a clinical and research veterinarian at the Southwest National Primate Research Center.

These “advocates” torture the animals they claim to champion. Sick, sick, sick.

“The animals are our top interest. (They’re) not data from a project, whereas for an investigator, (the data) would be their primary interest. We’re the animal advocate,” Dr. Brasky explained.

I think I’m going to be sick.

The Animal Welfare Act requires veterinarians to provide pain relief to animals for any procedure that might be perceived to cause pain in a person.

Unless the pain meds might interfere with the results. The animals never come first.

“I think lab animal veterinarians are much more attuned to pain and alleviating pain than human physicians,” she said. “We err on the side of caution.”

I’d rather be in a hospital where they were trying to cure me and alleviate my pain than be a monkey in a lab where they are making me sick and debating whether the pain meds might mess with the results of the experiment. Brasky is an idiot or a swindler trying to coax rather dumb vets into her fieild so she doesn’t feel so very alone and stigmatized.

For more information about research primates and laboratory animal medicine, visit the Web sites of the Association of Primate Veterinarians (www.primatevets.org), American College of Laboratory Animal Medicine (www.aclam.org), and National Center for Research Resources (www.ncrr.nih.gov/). Additionally, the AVMA has several policies on animal research and appropriate care for the animals, including “AVMA Animal Welfare Principles,” “Use of Animals in Research, Testing, and Education,” and “Responsible Use of Animals for Human Purposes.” These and other position statements are available on the AVMA Web site (www.avma.org) in the Reference section under “Policy.”

- R. Scott Nolen

VICTORY: HSUS Wins Litigation for Access to Lab Records

PrimateLabs.com — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:29:04 +0000

Abstract & Commentary: After eight years of dragging its heels, the USDA has finally agreed to begin complying with the federal law Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). This victory for transparency in government did not come about through voluntary change on part of the government or the vivisection industry. It was only made possible due to the diligence and litigation efforts of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The below articles discuss this change in USDA policy. The first article also features a quote from notorious primate vivisector David Jentsch, stating that this change may allow activists to further harass scientists and make “fallacious claims.”

It is unclear how the public’s access to these documents, which simply shed light on the operations of vivisection labs in the United States, will enable people to make fallacious claims and harass scientists. Quite the opposite; access to facility reports and institutional documents will help clarify and elucidate what is actually happening in labs. It provides an unbiased record and account for activists to show the public what is happening behind locked doors. In all likelihood, what Jentsch really fears is a truly well-informed populace. He is worried about the backlash and outrage that would occur when people become aware of the undeniable cruelty perpetrated on animals in labs, including his own, on a daily basis.

Animal use details to go online

Posted by Jef Akst, The Scientist, July 6, 2009

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) must post annual reports from animal research facilities that document the levels of pain and distress experienced by animals in experimental procedures, according to a court settlement last week (July 1) of a lawsuit between the USDA and the Humane Society.

“We have been taking a variety of steps to increase transparency on a number of issues, [and] the agreement we reached with the Human Society is consistent with that,” said USDA spokesperson Andrea McNally.

According to the Humane Society, the USDA stopped posting the annual reports, required by the Animal Welfare Act, around the end of 2001. When the USDA failed to provide copies of the reports requested by the Humane Society (in the form of Freedom of Information Act requests), the Humane Society filed charges in 2005. Since then, the USDA has been posting some of the reports, but the settlement makes the action mandatory. Under the settlement agreement, the USDA must also make clear which institutions have failed to submit them. In addition, the USDA must continue to look for several documents that are still missing, and report back to the Humane Society with the results of the search. “It became very clear that there isn’t a very good system for keeping track of these documents,” said Kathleen Conlee, Director of Program Management for Animal Research Issues of the Humane Society. “We’re hoping that as a result of this suit, they [will develop] a better system.”

The “open policy” regarding the oversight of animal laboratories enforced by this settlement “will help educate the public and advance human health research,” Thomas Rowell, director of the New Iberia Research Center of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, wrote in an email to The Scientist. (Earlier this year, that facility was cited for Animal Welfare Act violations in regard to its care of primates.) But David Jentsch, a neuropsychopharmacologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who organized a pro-research rally in April after being targeted by animal rights activists, warned that such information is not always used to honestly inform the public. “I think one’s reaction has to fit the complexity of the issue,” Jentsch said. “I’m all in favor of being as transparent as possible, and encouraging the USDA to do that as well, [but this information is often used] for making fallacious claims and harassing scientists.”

Original Article

Settlement to require animal labs to post data
By MARY CLARE JALONICK, Associated Press, July 2, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) – Animal research facilities will be required to disclosee more information online about their experiments under a court settlement signed Wednesday by the Humane Society of the United States and the Agriculture Department.

According to the Humane Society, the settlement will require the Agriculture Department to post annual reports from those facilities, including what they call “pain and distress information,” on its Web site. The two parties settled in a lawsuit filed by the advocacy group four years ago after the group were unable to obtain information they requested.

The settlement will now be submitted to the federal district court for the District of Columbia for final approval.

“While it became apparent during the suit that the USDA might be acting to shield animal research facilities from public scrutiny, we are pleased that the settlement will ensure public access to animal research information, and shed light on whether USDA is doing its job,” said Kathleen Conlee of the Humane Society.

The Bush administration stopped posting some animal testing information in 2002, according to the group, and then began posting the annual reports in 2005 in response to the lawsuit. Conlee said the court-approved settlement is important so future administrations don’t further abuse the policy.

Caleb Weaver, a spokesman for Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, confirmed the settlement.
The Animal Welfare Act, signed into law in 1966 and enforced by USDA, governs the care and handling of most warm-blooded animals at registered research facilities and licensed animal dealer facilities around the country. Birds, mice and rats bred for research are exempt from the law.

A 1970 amendment to the law requires those facilities to submit annual reports on its activities. According to the Humane Society, these reports should include information on how many and what kind of animals are used in research, whether pain relief was used and a justification if such relief was not provided.

The group’s 2005 lawsuit charged that the Department of Agriculture violated the Freedom of Information Act by denying them access to reports and redacting large amounts of information in reports they did provide.

Original Article

Texas Tech University: Our Public Oversight Committee is…Not Open to the Public

PrimateLabs.com — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 02:32:47 +0000

Vivisection laboratories are notoriously secretive. The public’s right to know what is happening with our money inside labs is continually eroding. Records that were considered typically public are now frequently denied by labs. The vivisection successfully lobbies frequently for new exemptions to public records laws to state and federal legislative bodies.

So nothing should surprise us about the news that Texas Tech University’s Health Science Center is refusing to turn over records related to their animal care and use committee meetings to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). In several states, these meetings are open to the public to come in and watch. The committees are required by the federal Animal Welfare Act after an amendment in the 1980s were passed to try and increase public oversight of research activities. In fact, the law requires that one member of the committee be a member of the public not affiliated with the institution.

However, the vivisection community may have found a new loophole to try and conceal their cruelties from the public: an exemption that excludes medical committees from the purview of open meeting/records laws. Such exemptions were likely initially created to allow for the privacy of human patients. The public has a rightful claim to privacy with concern to their medical records and affairs, so the exception makes sense. But, the idea that dogs and cats in abused and killed in vivisection labs have a similar claim to privacy is patently absurd.

PETA has an ongoing campaign against Texas Tech for their decision to use public animal shelters as a source of animals for harmful experimentation. You can read more about PETA’s campaign and ways you can help the campaign here and you can view the receipt for when Texas Tech purchased cats from Odessa’s City Animal Control here.

This is not the first time that Texas Tech has been the focus of animal rights activists. In July 1989, the Animal Liberation Front broke into Texas Tech and rescued cats that were being harmed by Dr. John Orem. Video was released which showed cats with electrodes protruding from their skulls. An interview with the activists that conducted the rescue can be found here.

Below is an article from Lubbock’s Avalanche-Journal about Texas Tech’s decision to hide from the sunlight of public scrutiny. Please consider writing letters to the editor and supporting PETA’s campaign against Texas Tech.

HSC allowed to withhold animal use records
By Marlena Hartz | AVALANCHE-JOURNAL
Friday, June 26, 2009

The Texas Tech Health Sciences Center can withhold records of a committee that oversees the use of animals in training and research, the Texas Attorney General’s Office ruled earlier this month.

An animal rights group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and The Avalanche-Journal requested Animal Care and Use Committee documents that may have shed light on the university’s decision to buy cats and dogs from a West Texas animal shelter for university training or research.

A Texas Health and Safety Code provision allows medical committees to keep their records and proceedings confidential, reads an explanatory June 15 letter from an assistant attorney general to the university’s legal department.

PETA argued the code shouldn’t apply to HSC’s Animal Care and Use Committee because the panel doesn’t deal with human patients.

The code lets the Animal Care and Use Committee, which is made up of HSC employees, freely deliberate, an HSC official said in a May interview with The A-J.

“It’s a group of people that have to make a decision and if your comments then are being discussed out on the Internet, say for example, you would be more inhibited as to what you would say and how you would express your opinions. That’s just human nature,” said Gordon Brackee, a veterinarian and the executive director of the university’s Laboratory Animal Research Center.

HSC’s communications department declined to comment Thursday on the ruling.
A PETA research associate said the committee documents should be open to the public because the university’s work, including its purchase of animals, is funded by taxpayers. The group also hoped the documents would show whether the university had thoroughly sought alternatives to using the shelter animals, a requirement of the Animal Welfare Act.

“What we’d like to know is why a public university would go to such lengths to keep documents about how they treat dogs and cats out of the public view,” Research Associate Ian Smith said. “I think the public expects a greater degree of transparency from the institutions they are funding.”
The university’s legal department challenged PETA’s request for committee documents through the attorney general’s office.

The HSC does have to release additional veterinary and animal use records to PETA, the office ruled. The A-J has requested those documents, as well, but they have not yet been released to The A-J or PETA, Smith said on Wednesday.

PETA launched a campaign in April against the HSC’s use of cats in first responder training.

The university has purchased cats already scheduled for euthanasia from Odessa Animal Control since the 1980s, a shelter spokesperson, Cpl. Sherrie Carruth, told The A-J.

Students training to save babies and small children in emergencies insert breathing tubes and needles into the cats, which are anesthetized during the training and then euthanized, according to HSC officials.

The university also purchased dogs from the shelter up until 2007, Carruth said. Purchasing records for the dogs have been released to The A-J, but they don’t show how or why the dogs were used. University officials have either declined to answer A-J questions about the use of the dogs or have said they don’t know how the dogs are being used.

The HSC purchased 11 dogs from the shelter in 2006 and 2007, according to records.

“A shelter in many people’s minds is a place where animals are cared for and respected. In this situation, animals are being turned into a revenue source (for the shelter),” Smith said.

The university pays $15 apiece for cats, records show. Records The A-J has obtained through the Texas Public Information Act don’t show how much the HSC paid for the dogs.

Carruth has said the HSC is the only research institution the shelter officials have sold animals to, and they do so because they believe it advances human health.
Original Article

Three More Laboratories Violate Animal Welfare Law

PrimateLabs.com — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:00:46 +0000

Reports show animal welfare violations at 3 labs

By FREDERIC J. FROMMER June 12, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) Government inspection reports cited three research laboratories for a host of animal welfare violations, ranging from problems with surgeries that forced researchers to euthanize a dog and a primate to leaving a live hamster in a walk-in freezer.

The reports, uncovered by an animal rights group, detail violations at BioReliance Corp., Charles River Laboratories Inc., and Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine.

The animal rights group, Stop Animal Exploitation Now, based in Milford, Ohio, criticized the U.S. Agriculture Department for not taking tough enforcement action against the facilities.

“These facilities should face serious consequences,” said the group’s executive director, Michael Budkie.

The USDA, which is charged with enforcing the Animal Welfare Act’s standards for research animals, said it did enter into an out-of-court $10,000 financial settlement with one of the institutions, Charles River. But that settlement was for a different incident, in May, 2008, when too-hot temperatures led to the deaths of primates.

Charles River announced last August that 32 primates died in May 2008 at its Sparks, Nev., lab, saying the cause was an incorrect climate-control operation.

Budkie called the payment “virtually meaningless,” saying the primates that died probably cost the company more than $10,000.

The USDA reports show that:

_At Charles River Laboratories’ Shrewsbury, Mass., facility, two primates undergoing surgical procedures were handled improperly. One subsequently had to be euthanized. A dog also had to be euthanized after a gauze square was left in its abdominal cavity during a previous surgery and caused an obstruction.
Charles River spokeswoman Amy Cianciaruso said in an e-mail that since that August 2008 USDA report, “We have implemented new procedures and enhanced our processes, which has helped prevent the recurrence of similar events at this facility.”

_At BioReliance Corp., in Rockville, Md., a lab assistant reported a hamster running loose inside the walk-in refrigerator, and a live hamster was found in a euthanasia bag inside the walk-in freezer. Failure to follow established euthanasia procedures “caused undue pain and distress for 2 hamsters and possibly 18 other hamsters.”
Another report said a lab assistant reported finding a dead hamster in a cage in June 2008 after the cage was removed from a sterilizer. “It is assumed the animal was alive prior to being placed” into the sterilizer, the report said, and a system of checks and balances must be established “to ensure animals are not subjected to unnecessary pain and distress.”

BioReliance said it reported the hamster incidents to the USDA. “The issues surrounding the events have been corrected and disciplinary actions were taken. Since these events, the company has received two clean inspections by the USDA,” the company said in a statement.

_At Tufts University’s School of Veterinary Medicine in North Grafton, Mass., a 2006 USDA inspection report faulted the school for withholding anesthesia from piglets and lambs during procedures without adequate scientific justification for doing so. The report does not identify the procedures. School spokesman Tom Keppeler said it was castration.

The piglets and lambs were part of the school’s working farm, Keppeler said, and farm animals in the U.S. are routinely castrated without anesthesia.

Gail Golab, director of the animal welfare division of the American Veterinary Medical Association, confirmed that anesthesia is not usually used during farm animal castrations for a variety of reasons, such as questions about the drugs’ effectiveness and residue they’d leave in the animals that are ultimately eaten.

The school appealed the citation in 2007, arguing that because farm animals used for food are excluded from the Animal Welfare Act, the castration of these animals should be excluded from federal regulation under the law. The agency denied the appeal, saying the animals are covered by the law when used for teaching veterinary students.
Piglets and lambs at the school are still castrated without anesthesia just not by the students.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press.