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

Newsletters
The Defender
From Summer 2009 Issue

SAEN files Massive Federal Complaint against 26 U.S. Labs – United Press International runs Major News Story

On June 1, 2009, Stop Animal Exploitation NOW! filed the largest USDA complaint in the history of the animal rights movement. Following a year-long analysis, SAEN investigators have uncovered illegal duplication of animal experimentation in 26 major U.S. laboratories which squander over $110 million in federal tax dollars every 5 years.

The 57 projects examined were compared over 6 different categories: use of primate species, primate restraint chairs, food or water deprivation, restraining bars, recording cylinders, and eye coils. Our analysis demonstrated that these projects averaged 5.4 out of 6 of the relevant categories. This high level of consistency in the 6 key areas clearly demonstrates duplication and redundancy.

In a letter addressed to Tom Vilsack (Secretary of Agriculture), Dr. Robert Gibbens, and Dr. Elizabeth Goldentyre (Directors of the USDA’s Western and Eastern Regions of Animal Care Division), SAEN’s Executive Director, Michael A. Budkie, proclaimed:

“It is quite clear that a high level of redundancy exists in these experiments. They use the same species of animals, investigate the same processes in the brain, use the same procedures, and are funded by the same part of the National Institutes of Health.”

The Animal Welfare Act, which regulates the use of animals in experimentation, contains provisions designed to prevent the performance of unnecessarily duplicative experiments. Researchers are required by law to file assurances that their experiments are not unnecessarily duplicative. However, it is obvious from SAEN’s investigation that many of these 57 researchers have filed fraudulent statements.

United Press International (UPI) immediately ran a major story on this ground-breaking SAEN complaint. The UPI story has now been featured on over 9,000 news web pages, including those of USA Today, The Guardian (Great Britain), TimesoftheInternet, etc., literally reaching millions of people with the reality of waste, redundancy, and cruelty in U.S. laboratories.

The ultimate success of SAEN’s landmark complaint could mean the end of many highly duplicative experiments. This complaint could free hundreds of rhesus monkeys from laboratory cages while saving U.S. taxpayers tens of millions in wasted federal funding every year. Your help is vital if this campaign is to be successful!.

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