Thursday, May 19, 2005

PETA Undercover Expose of Billion-Dollar Drug-Testing Company Reveals Multiple Violations of Animal Welfare Act


At a news conference in Princeton today, PETA revealed the findings of an 11-month undercover investigation into Covance (NYSE: CVD - News) -- the billion-dollar Princeton, N.J.-based company that owns one of the world's largest contract animal-testing laboratories. At the laboratory, in Vienna, Va., PETA secretly videotaped repeated violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act by Covance workers, including the following:

* Punching, choking, and taunting injured monkeys
* Recycling sick monkeys into new experiments
* Failing to administer veterinary care to severely wounded monkeys
* Failing to provide euthanasia to monkeys in extreme distress
* Failing to properly oversee lab workers, who roughly tear monkeys from their cages and violently shove them into restraint tubes
* Performing painful and stressful procedures in full view of other animals
* Monkeys with chronic rectal prolapses resulting from constant stress and diarrhea
* Daily bloody noses caused by dosing small monkeys by forcing large tubes up their nostrils and into their stomachs
* Monkey self-mutilation resulting from failure to provide psychological enrichment and socialization

PETA representatives screened the undercover video and provided details of a 253-page complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture that asks for the laboratory to be shut down until a thorough investigation can be conducted.

In 2003, an investigation of Covance's Munster, Germany, primate facility revealed the same abuses videotaped in PETA's current investigation.

"The tape shows experimenters using their power over the monkeys to torture and torment them while lab supervisors stand by or even join in," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "The U.S. Department of Agriculture is empowered to stop this type of abuse, yet its inspectors only enter these monkey prisons once a year, and everyone at the labs knows which day that is."

Story here.

Peta story and pictures here.

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