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Stop Animal Exploitation NOW!
S. A. E. N.
"Exposing the truth to wipe out animal experimentation"

Newsletters
The Defender
From Spring 2008 Issue

From the Desk of Michael Budkie, SAEN’s Executive Director

 Animal experimentation is an enormous issue involving colleges, universities, private corporations and entire government agencies. This industry is supported by a bureaucratic edifice which includes both the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Agriculture.

The laboratories themselves have become huge bureaucracies, often with public information officers, legal counsel, and immense budgets. Internal correspondence from a University of Washington official recently indicated that this entity rakes in roughly $250 million per year in proceeds from animal experimentation alone. The private corporations involved in animal experimentation are also huge corporations. Charles River Laboratories maintains over nine sites spread throughout eight states, with more locations under construction.

The number of registered research facilities in the United States hovers in the vicinity of 1100. Many labs have been identified by SAEN and the animal protection movement as a whole for both performing unbelievably hideous experiments and violating legal standards with shocking regularity. This list encompasses labs which are household names and ones which torture animals in anonymity.

The big names in animal abuse include many U.S. institutions of higher learning such as: Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, University of Wisconsin, Harvard, UCLA, etc. The list of corporations known for animal cruelty is no shorter. Covance labs span many states. Many of the companies that produce drugs and other products also abuse animals in labs including Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Meyers, etc.

However, the well-known labs are not the only places where animals suffer. Smith-Kettlewell Institute in California has clearly demonstrated their ability to cause immense suffering through illicit experimental surgical procedures. The staff of Santa Cruz Biotechnology has shown that they can torture goats and rabbits mercilessly. I must confess that before I received the North Dakota State University (NDSU) inspection reports from the USDA, I had never considered the possibility that I would need to investigate a lab located in Fargo, ND. And now I am examining health care records for sheep that died horrible deaths at NDSU.

Recently, I have learned the gory details about labs which I had never even heard of only a few months ago. And I have unearthed abuses that I would have thought impossible. Beginning a post-mortem on a baboon which was not yet dead is the stuff of nightmares. But then so is placing random screws in the skull of a macaque monkey. Every time that I think that I have seen everything, I am shocked again. I have finally realized that if the human mind can conceive of a form of brutality, it has probably been done to an animal in a laboratory.

Our task is huge. More labs are abusing animals than ever before, even small and unfamiliar ones. We cannot simply focus on big name facilities; we must also locate the tiny contract labs that have tortured animals in secret for decades. The scope of our work must broaden on an almost daily basis.

But the struggle is not hopeless; the fight is not in vain. We can keep pressure on the labs, NIH, and USDA. We can force them to end the abuse. And most importantly, we must show that no matter what they do, no matter how they attempt to justify abuse, no matter how they try to hide their cruelty, SAEN will be there to bring out the truth and make sure that they do not go unpunished.

I want you to know that as long as animals are abused in labs, as long as they are imprisoned and suffering, and as long as they are exploited so that corporations and colleges can continue to rake in obscene amounts of our tax dollars – SAEN will continue to stand up for the dogs, cats, primates, rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, and mice that are so terribly victimized. As long as SAEN exists, the animals will have a voice, and the laboratories will have an adversary. We will never give up the fight because the animals are depending on us. And just as the animals are depending on SAEN, we are depending on you to make it possible for us to continue our crusade to bring an end to animal experimentation.

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