NEWSANIMAL TESTING

Before buying airplane tickets for your next trip, you might want to find out if your luggage is sharing cargo space with primates destined for a research lab. Depending on the airline, you could be flying with cruel cargo.

American Airlines recently joined the league of airlines that refuse to ship primates as cargo when the primates will be used in research experiments. After discussions with British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, AA updated its policy to clarify that the airline does not support research, experimentation or exploitation of primates.

BUAV is urging the remaining airlines accepting research-bound primates as cargo to adopt a transportation ban. Today, to further advance their Primate Cargo Cruelty campaign, BUAV has launched a video about the role that airlines play in promoting the research industry.

World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week is this week (April 16-24), and there's no better way to kick it off than to ask your leaders to co-sponsor the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act.

The United States is the last developed country in the world to keep a large number of chimpanzees — about 1,000 — for medical experimentation, but the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act aims to change that.

The Humane Society of the United States estimates that ending biomedical research on great apes could save taxpayers up to 25 million dollars a year and an additional tens of millions of dollars every year for the cessation of breeding programs.

If passed, the bill will end invasive biomedical research on chimpanzees, free all federally captive chimpanzees in labs to sanctuaries, end funding for invasive research both nationally and internationally, and finally, end all funding for breeding programs of federally owned chimps.

This spring, seven endangered green sea turtles in a University of British Columbia research lab will be killed in order to determine why turtles die when they get caught in trawl nets.

The turtles are at least 10 years old and have been involved in a university research project for the past decade. If the researchers don’t kill them, they could live to be 30. But Bill Milsom, head of the university’s zoology department, told the Vancouver Sun that the turtles must die to complete a study on diving depths, which will help determine how deep trawl fishing nets need to descend in the ocean to avoid catching — and killing — turtles.

So in other words, as Sarah King blogged on Greenpeace Canada, Milsom is saying "it is necessary to kill the turtles to help figure out how not to kill the turtles."

There's no Bones about it, Emily Deschanel is a friend to animals. The vegan actress is now fighting on behalf of 14 chimpanzees being used for testing by the National Institutes of Health.

Deschanel  was hopping mad when she learned that NIH transferred 14 elderly chimpanzees from their retirement facility to the Southwest National Primate Research Center to undergo more testing. These chimps have been poked and prodded all their lives, and were finally left in peace at the Alamogordo Primate Facility. Deschanel penned a letter to the NIH in protest of the move, informing NIH that the primate research center has a “long history of animal abuse.”

“All of the Alamogordo chimpanzees have already been subjected to so much pain and suffering,” Deschanel writes in her letter to NIH. “Many of them were used in painful, invasive experiments for decades before being retired in Alamogordo. All of them … deserve to live out their lives in peace.”

Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, is a columnist for Change.org.

As I've pointed out many times,  our relationships with other animals are confused, challenging, and frustrating. Recently we've learned that rhesus monkeys, called "furry couch potatoes," are being used by the Oregon Heath and Science University to study human obesity and diabetes.

About 50 of the approximately 4300 monkeys imprisoned at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) are being used in this study. The monkeys are fattened up by giving them lots of rich, fattening food, and kept in small cages so they can't have any exercise. Some of the monkeys will also undergo gastric surgery and be euthanized; a sanitized way of saying they're killed so that their pancreas and brain can be examined.

After receiving over 1,100 emails from Change.org members, it looks like Lipton lovers can now drink easy: as of this month, Lipton's parent company, Unilever, issued a press release, stating that it is "committing to no animal testing for our tea and tea-based beverages, with immediate effect."

The company says the commitment is part of their "leadership" in environmental sustainability and ethical sourcing of their teas, but the announcement comes after a December report from the United Kingdom's People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA UK), stating that tea companies PG tips, Lipton and Lyons had been testing their products on animals in some pretty gruesome experiments that were decidedly not "100% natural."

Last weekend, 48 monkeys were flown from China to Toronto via the cargo hold of an Air Canada jetliner. At Pearson Airport, they waited for more than 15 hours in their cramped wooden crates until a truck finally arrived to transport them to a research lab in Quebec.

According to the Toronto Sun, the incident was made public by Sarah Kite of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), who was alarmed not just by the fact that Air Canada agreed to transport the monkeys, but also by the way they were shipped and forced to languish at the airport. (A spokesman for LAB Research Canada has denied this claim.)

Many other airlines, including British Airways, Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines, Qantas Airways, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, have already taken a humane step by refusing to ship lab animals internationally. But Air Canada President and CEO Calin Rovinescu claims it’s beyond his control that his company continues to do so.

Nearly 200 chimpanzees formerly used for invasive research are getting a new, albeit temporary, lease on life.

You might remember the ongoing saga of the Alamogordo chimpanzees, the former research animals living at a National Institutes of Health facility in New Mexico. Tempers flared last year when the NIH announced that the chimps were going to be moved to Texas and put back into the research grind. Talk about a change in standard of living. At least in the Alamogordo facility, the chimps had access to fresh fruit, socialization, indoor and outdoor areas, and the like. It's a far cry from being put back into the pool of animals to be confined, poked, prodded, hurt, and exposed to lots of nasty substances.

The chimps' plight raised a big wave of activism and awareness. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine raised a ruckus, and it ended up turning into a pretty star-studded one at that. Among the celebrities who got involved were Gene Hackman, True Blood's Kristin Bauer, and the closest thing the primate world has to a rock star, Dr. Jane Goodall.

Even the Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, got involved in a big way, making it clear that he wanted the chimps to stay retired (and in New Mexico) and then rattling cages at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get an investigation underway.

NASA's plan to study the effects of radiation on squirrel monkeys has been cancelled thanks to the hard work of several organizations and activists like you.

Earlier this week, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine sent out the good news. After over a year of campaigning, PCRM learned that not only were the experiments cancelled, but that NASA announced intentions to review all of their research and future development plans.

"Because of your hard work, these monkeys will not be irradiated or otherwise abused," PCRM wrote their supporters. "Furthermore, we have sent a powerful message to all federal agencies that they must consider the interests of animals in the pursuit of research."

Petitions were started on Change.org by Kinship Circle, PETA, and community member, Dian Wright, opposing NASA's squirrel monkey experiment.

According to a new report by the United Kingdom's People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA UK), tea companies PG tips, Lipton and Lyons have been testing their products on animals in some pretty gruesome experiments that are decidedly not "100% natural."

The report says that rabbits were fed a diet high in fat to increase cholesterol levels to egregiously high levels and to harden their arteries. Then, the companies fed the animals tea in their water, ostensibly to demonstrate that if the levels decreased, they could market their product as having health benefits. Rabbits weren’t the only test subjects; mice were bred with severe bowel inflammation problems, and then fed tea to see if it helped. And piglets were infected with E. Coli, to give them diarrhea, and I suppose the tea companies felt that their product might have an effect on that, too?

In any event, even if tea had helped the artificially, intentionally sickened animals, they were all killed afterwards for their trouble. It doesn't get less natural than this.

And this might not be all. Other reports have stated that the Lipton brand uses animal products in their teas — like blood. To dye it the right color.