The University of Washington's Animal Care Committee is currently conducting much of its actions outside of public view. The state of Washington requires that all meetings of governing bodies of publicly funded agencies be open to the public.
ELENA WALDMAN: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is filing a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the University of Washington (UW) over its refusal to disclose exactly who is on its ironically named Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), the group that is supposed to ensure that all animal protection laws are enforced in the school’s laboratories but has failed miserably to prevent animals’ deaths from starvation, dehydration, strangulation, scalding, blood loss, and other causes.
The state of Washington’s Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) requires that all meetings of governing bodies of publicly funded agencies be open to the public. The IACUC, which meets the description of a governing body under the OPMA, is currently conducting much of its actions outside of public view.
When the members do show their faces, it’s in brief monthly meetings via Zoom web calls with their names hidden. Instead, participants use anonymous labels such as “IACUC1” or “IACUC2,” and even these placeholder names are subject to change from one meeting to the next… UW’s experiments are largely funded by taxpayer dollars, so at the very least, the school owes the public full transparency…
The groundbreaking lawsuit asks the court to order the disclosure of these IACUC members’ names and to set aside any actions taken by the committee that violate OPMA. If PETA is successful, actions taken by the IACUC, including the approval of experiments, in violation of the law may be deemed null and void and any such experiments may need to be reviewed again properly.
The IACUC is meant to be the last line of defense for animals suffering in laboratories, responsible for ensuring that animal protection laws and regulations are adhered to, yet we don’t even know whether its members are qualified to hold their positions so long as UW suspiciously conceals their identities.
Under the provisions of the federal Animal Welfare Act, IACUCs are required to have a certain makeup of members, including a nonscientist and a community member representing the general community’s interests in the treatment of animals. But the UW IACUC’s “nonscientific” member is Ken Gordon, the executive director of the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research, which promotes experiments on animals.
The membership of its IACUC isn’t the only thing that UW is trying to hide. In December 2020, PETA filed a lawsuit against the school for its failure to release documents detailing the decision to purchase a rundown, contaminated facility in the Arizona desert where UW’s primate center has been breeding macaques for use in experiments. The school has also failed to turn over documents detailing the primate center’s financial and leadership crises…
UW’s IACUC has a shameful track record… In 2015, PETA released the first-ever footage shot inside UW’s Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC), which revealed isolated monkeys pacing inside cramped, barren cages, we reviewed public records that further exposed the cruelty in the school’s laboratories… Between November 2017 and March 2021, 77 incidents were documented in which animals at UW sustained serious injuries or died, nearly two per month. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEOS: