Animal-rights activists are asking a simple question: How can universities claim animals are vital to research, while now classifying so many of them as expendable?
MARC PARRY: The pandemic is curtailing all but the most critical lab research. Many scientists are responding by sacrificing mice as they shelve studies and seek to reduce work for the animal-care staff members who must risk their health to look out for the mice and other animals that colleges still possess… It has also become a rallying cry for animal-rights groups, who are spotlighting the carnage to call for an end to animal testing…
Animal-rights activists are seizing on that devastation to drive home a simple question: How can universities claim animals are vital to research, while now classifying so many of them as expendable?… University scientists and animal-care officials characterize the euthanization of some animals as regrettable but necessary…
Whenever a lab scientist tweets about killing animals, or a university official issues guidance about euthanizing them, PETA activists log that utterance into a spreadsheet. They respond with their own barrage of tweets, public letters, and media interviews demanding an end to what they see as cruel, wasteful, and ineffective research…
PETA also urges universities to tell the public, whose tax dollars pay for much animal research, how many animals are dying. “As Covid-19 continues to spread, we are fearing that universities are going to choose secrecy over transparency to hide what they’re doing to animals in laboratories,” says Shalin Gala, PETA’s vice president for international laboratory methods.
On its website and in an interview with The Chronicle, PETA criticized the University of California at San Diego for having closed public access to the animal-research section of its “Covid-19 Continuity of Research” webpage after the group highlighted a part of that site that referenced “culling nonessential animals.” (As of Thursday afternoon, it required a password for access). SOURCE…
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