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USC’s research labs accused of animal cruelty again
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Contact:
Dr. Robert Gibbens
Director, Animal Welfare Operations, USDA-APHIS
[email protected]
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Please levy the MAXIMUM FINE against the University of Southern California for their blatant disregard of the Animal Welfare Act when their negligence inflicted excessive neck injuries on pigs. Their behavior should NOT be tolerated and MUST be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
USC’s research labs accused of animal cruelty again
From Cari Spencer, DailyTrojan.com, February 19, 2021
USC’s research labs face more accusations of animal cruelty, after a
nonprofit watchdog group Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! obtained internal USC
reports alleging that lab members performed unnecessary amputations on mice,
knowingly created excessive neck wounds on pigs and overdosed mice with
opioids. The University is currently in an ongoing lawsuit regarding animal
cruelty accusations, filed by SAEN last year.
The nonprofit organization, which works to expose laboratory animal abuse,
obtained the reports through a Freedom of Information Act early February.
USC reported the violations, occurring in 2019 and 2020, in letters to the
National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. The
letter explained that the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee voted
to suspend the lab’s animal use protocol for 90 days, barred all individuals
involved from accessing the animal facility and made plans to prevent future
occurrences.
SAEN filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Tuesday, for
the University’s “clear violation of the Animal Welfare Act.” The complaint
is in regards to the lab allegedly creating nine wounds on pig necks during
surgery, when the lab was only authorized to create three.
“There’s clearly no way of knowing what was in the mind of the people that
did these things, but making neck injuries on pigs in what was supposed to
be an experiment, in a situation where you’re not going to be able to use
the information, or even a report that you did that because it violates your
own protocol?” said Executive Director of SAEN Michael A. Budkie in an
interview with the Daily Trojan. “I mean, this is extremely disturbing.”
The other alleged violations in the USC reports — 14 cages of mice overdosed
with Buprenorphine SR and found to have surgeries performed incorrectly
according to Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee protocols, as well
as four adult mice with amputated ears despite lab technicians lacking
approval — were not included in the complaint, as the Act does not cover
rats and mice.
The complaint calls upon the U.S Department of Agriculture to issue the
maximum fine allowable to USC, which is $10,000 per infraction, per animal.
The group also wrote a letter to President Carol Folt and the Board of
Trustees that requested an independent investigation of USC’s animal
experimentation system and claimed nothing had appeared to change since the
last time SAEN contacted the University about animal abuse.
In the letter to Folt, Budkie wrote that the response from the University
was “nowhere near sufficient,” and called on USC to terminate the lab
members for their “heinous acts.”
“The question that has to be raised here is: was this simply gratuitous
violence against these animals? And that is certainly what it
appears,”Budkie said. “I’ve been working on the animal research issue on one
level or another since 1986. I can count on, probably one hand, the number
of times that I’ve run across information that appears to be intentional
animal abuse. And now, two of those situations have occurred at USC.”
In response to the reports, USC sent a statement to the Daily Trojan
asserting that the reports demonstrate the University’s commitment to the
ethical and human treatment of animals in research.
“It was the university that first discovered these incidents and
self-reported them to National Institutes of Health,” the statement read.
“The university has since taken a number of steps, including enhanced
retraining, to help ensure that they don’t reoccur.”
In June 2019, SAEN filed a lawsuit against the University for allegedly
routinely violating mandatory research protocols and animal welfare laws and
regulations. According to the lawsuit, USC was accused of killing baby
animals by placing them in a carcass-disposal freezer while still alive,
performing unauthorized surgeries and injections on animals and withholding
post-operative care such as pain killers from animals — among other alleged
violations. The most recent violations will be included in the ongoing
lawsuit, Budkie said in an email to the Daily Trojan.
In the statement, USC also denied SAEN’s allegations in the lawsuit.
“The university is highly committed to the ethical and humane treatment of
animals in research, and meets or exceeds all accrediting and regulatory
standards,” the University wrote.
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