Exposing Cruelty in Alabama
During World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week 2005,
Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! joined with activists from Alabama Voice
for Animals to reveal brutality that is commonplace within the
laboratories of the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Our joint
protests and news conferences generated media coverage from (4)
television stations over a two-day period, including a live remote on
April 20th during a candlelight vigil.
Experimentation performed on primates at the
University of Alabama, Birmingham is highly invasive, extremely painful,
and stressful. One experiment deprives primates of water for as much as
21 hours per day, 5 days per week. Another part of this project bolts
metal strips to the primate’s head, which support a head restraint post
to immobilize the head during the protocol. Coils are implanted near the
eyes, holes are cut into the skull, and electrodes are fed into the
brain. The highly invasive nature of the procedures is common.
This procedure should sound very familiar to you. It
is almost an exact duplicate of experiments performed at dozens of other
labs, including Harvard, Emory, UCLA, University of Washington
(Seattle), etc. This is one of the most repeated procedures in all of
animal experimentation. The National Institutes of Health currently
funds this basic paradigm 175 times across the U.S.
As we have found at many other laboratories, the
primate inmates at this Alabama prison are suffering horribly. Direct
quotes from UAB’s primate health care records reveal shocking
conditions:
Primate 20680 - "The eyes are sunken in the
orbits. Body condition is poor. Animal is thin with little adipose
tissue (fat) anywhere and little muscular tissue on extremities."
Clearly, this animal was so severely ill that all body fat was gone and
the muscles had begun to disappear. This primate suffered substantially.
Primate 20694 - This rhesus monkey was so
highly stressed by captivity that: "he was a self-mutilator who had an
extended period of lesion healing and reinjury . . . "
Primate 20754 - A rhesus monkey who was
extremely ill: "Animal in poor body condition. She is both too small and
too thin. The spleen is smaller than expected. She has no detectable
external or internal body fat." The lack of body fat likely indicates a
lengthy period of serious disease.
Primate 20792 - "The animal has minimal body
fat." - Again, this indicates long-term serious illness.
Primate 20772 – "He was noticed to be lame with
swollen left ankle." Again, another rhesus monkey who suffered
tremendously.
Animal after animal at UAB clearly indicate abnormally
high levels of suffering and stress. Lack of body fat, swollen joints,
self-mutilation - all of these things indicate extreme misery for these
victimized animals. Clearly, the primates within UAB labs suffer
tremendously.
These Animals Need Your Letters!
Please help us to keep the pressure on this abusive
lab. Please write to protest the cruelty they practice on primates:
Carol Z. Garrison, Ph.D., President
University of Alabama, Birmingham
701 20th St. South, Suite 1070
Birmingham, AL 35294
cgarrison@uab.edu
205-934-4636
