PETA’s ‘10 Worst Laboratories’ List

1. The University of Wisconsin-Madison
It’s tempting to call the University of Wisconsin-Madison the nexus of evil in the world, but we’ll simply call it the worst animal-abusing university in the country. UW-Madison has a long tradition of animal abuse—including Professor Harry Harlow’s infamous 1950s-era studies in which baby monkeys were torn from their mothers and placed next to abusive mechanical “monster mothers.” Today, UW-Madison continues this shameful tradition by keeping approximately 2,500 primates imprisoned—with an estimated 500 confined to isolation cages—and performing painful and distressing experiments on more than 850 each year.

In March, PETA exposed a serious conflict of interests as well as violations of scientific integrity in Professor John Webster’s government-funded and industry-biased testing of Taser stun guns on pigs. The study had multiple paid consultants who had ties to Taser, and under intense public pressure, UW-Madison kicked Taser medical advisor John Stratbucker off the study. Despite this effort to deceive the university and the federal government, Eric Sandgren—chair of the university’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC)—has allowed the experiment to continue even though countless Taser experiments on animals have failed to determine if Tasers are safe. Learn more about Taser.

But wait, there’s more: Sandgren and the UW-Madison IACUC have repeatedly come under fire for secrecy, negligence, and public obstruction—which prompted a lawsuit against them for illegally conducting public meetings in private. UW-Madison had good reason to want to avoid scrutiny—a routine U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection discovered that an alarming number of monkeys died in university-approved protocols there. In barbaric experiments conducted by Professor Ei Terasawa, drugs were injected directly into conscious primates’ brains using the “push-pull perfusion” method. Terasawa surgically implanted “cranial pedestals” into the monkeys’ skulls and attached them to restraint chairs, where the monkeys remained immobilized for three full days. During that time, a two-chambered pipe was fixed in their brains; chemicals were injected through one chamber and samples were extracted through the other (thus, the term “push-pull”). Depending on which study was being conducted, this process lasted for hours or even days, and each monkey was used in up to 10 separate push-pull experiments. No wonder the death toll was high! One monkey died alone in the restraint chair while researchers went out to lunch. It was also discovered that Terasawa routinely deviated from her own protocols—so much for lofty science.

Terasawa is one of the university’s most senior researchers; she is also entrusted with millions of dollars in government grant money and is in charge of training new experimenters. Terasawa’s failure to comply with the minimum regulations of the AWA is an indictment of her entire university and her experiments.

Please write, call, fax, or e-mail the head of the university and politely ask him to stop these atrocities:

John D. Wiley, Chancellor
University of Wisconsin-Madison
161 Bascom Hall
500 Lincoln Dr.
Madison, WI 53706
608-262-9946
608-262-8333 (fax)
jdwiley@bascom.wisc.edu