Decompressing Sheep and Starving Monkeys: Animal Labs in Madison

Oh, Madison. Madison, Wisconsin, is a place I very much like, but forever adding to the complexity of my feelings about the small city (which, on a personal level, is also home to long-ago tangled family history) is how often I see un-animal-friendly news coming out of this otherwise progressive section of Wisconsin, largely as a result of one cruel institution: animal research -- specifically, in most cases, the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center.

In July, in "Do They Look Like They're 'Enjoying' Life to You?" for example, I wrote briefly about a horrid  decades-long study involving the starvation and isolation of rhesus macaques. (And as Madison's active animal rights organization Alliance for Animals points out, non-animal advocates in the area have reacted with discomfort to the unnecessary study as well, including, briefly, the editorial board of a local news station.)

This time, though, the news of cruelty isn't coming out of the primate labs, but rather arises from the University of Wisconsin's apparent longtime habit of using -- and killing -- sheep in decompression experiments. Alliance for Animals shares these extracts from the university's 2008 report on the experiments:

Sixteen adult Suffolk ewes with no evidence of clinical lameness and with normal limb bone scans were subjected to a single 24-hour exposure of compressed air in a large, high pressure chamber at the UW Biotron Laboratory. . . .

Each animal was observed for clinical signs of decompression sickness such as limb lifting, a manifestation of the discomfort in limb bends, labored breathing or panting, indicative of pulmonary gas embolism, otherwise known as the “chokes” or respiratory decompression sickness (RDCS). The sheep were observed continuously for 4 h[ours] immediately post-dropout decompression. The number of limb-lifting episodes in each limb was recorded.

Decompression caused six fatal cases of the chokes or respiratory decompression sickness (RDCS).

All four “control” sheep that breathed only air during [decompression] died of RDCS. One sheep in each of the 15-min and 1-h [oxygen] pre-breathing groups also died of RDCS.

The group has filed a complaint (PDF) with the National Institutes of Health and has called on the Dane County district attorney (PDF letter) to investigate.

Madison newspaper The Isthmus is also covering this story. The article goes into detail, courtesy of local attorney and animal advocate Leslie Hamilton (ironically, the very attorney I had brief communications with a couple years ago regarding completely unrelated family research -- small world, eh?), on how the plight of the sheep came to light (including, initially, the voiced concerns of a lab assistant who'd witnessed the cruel research) and on why the research, beyond being inhumane and unnecessary, is also illegal. The article indicates too that so far, though he's awaiting university responses to questions, district attorney Brian Blanchard seems to agree with Hamilton and animal advocates that this practice violates a specific Wisconsin state law prohibiting the killing of animals by decompression, a law to which research is not an exception. Read the piece here.

If you live in the Madison area, and you too love the city while not loving the things that happen to animals there--and you want to get involved with not only this campaign on behalf of the sheep but other animal advocacy campaigns as well--check in with Alliance for Animals.

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Photo of (shorn) Suffolk sheep by Brent Moore, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons