WWAIL Pt. 1: CT events for World Week for Animals in Labs

This week, Connecticut Activists will protest cruel experiments on mice, monkeys, cats, pigs and other animals at Yale University, the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC) and Hartford Hospital in recognition of World Week for Animals in Laboratories, a global event intended to raise awareness about the suffering of hundreds of millions animals:

Tuesday April 22

1:30 – 2:30 p.m., Yale University, 300 George Street, New Haven

Thursday April 24

1:30 – 2:30 p.m., University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington Entrance, Farmington, CT

3:30 – 5 p.m., Hartford Hospital, Hospital Entrance at 80 Seymour Street, Hartford

Click "read more" for further information about the suffering of animals at these institutions and for more information about how you can help.

Yale University

At Yale University, experimenter Marina Picciotto has received more than $15 million of taxpayer money since 1996 for experiments in which she forcibly exposes mice and rats to nicotine by injecting it into their abdomens, placing it directly into holes cut into their skulls or feeding them only water laced with the drug, forcing them to either drink it or die of dehydration (Addy and others 2007, Vieyra-Reyes and others 2008). The animals are then killed by decapitation while fully conscious and their brains are removed to study the effects of the drug exposure. Some of her studies involve hanging mice by their tails from paper clips supposedly to observe if exposure to nicotine effected anxiety and depression-like behaviors (Vieyra-Reyes and others 2008). In other studies by Yale experimenters, monkeys are captured in the wild, isolated in a laboratory, injected with antipsychotic drugs and killed to study their effects on the animals' brains (Elsworth and others 2007).

Take action- Click here to help stop nicotine experiments on animals (link will be live after 1pm on 4/22)

University of Connecticut Health Center
On any given day, there are 9,000 animals suffering inside of UCHC, including kittens who have plastic tubes forced down their throats, rats and cats who have holes drilled into their skulls (Loftus and others 2008) and mice who are locked in cages and have their entire bodies intentionally infested with ticks (Müller-Doblies and others 2007). UCHC is well-known for abusing animals in labs and in January 2008 was ordered to return $65K to the National Institutes of Health for more than 20 violations of animal welfare laws in a monkey laboratory.

Take action- Click here to help permanently end cruel training course at UCHC

Hartford Hospital
Each month, Hartford Hospital conducts a live animal trauma training course (Advanced Trauma Operative Management, or ATOM) in which pigs must suffer through fourteen penetrating injuries such as stab wounds to the abdomen and chest, stomach, inferior vena cava, and heart (Jacobs and others 2006). At the end of the one-day course, the pigs are killed. This month's course is on April 24th, the day of our protest.

Take action- Click here to help end cruel training course at Hartford Hospital

References
Addy NA, Fornasiero EF, Stevens TR, Taylor JR, Picciotto MR. Role of calcineurin in nicotine-mediated locomotor sensitization. J Neurosci. 2007 Aug 8;27(32):8571-80.

Elsworth JD, Jentsch JD, Morrow BA, Redmond DE Jr, Roth RH. Clozapine normalizes prefrontal cortex dopamine transmission in monkeys subchronically exposed to phencyclidine. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2008 Feb;33(3):491-6.

Jacobs LM Jr, Luk SS, Burns KJ. Advanced Trauma Operative Management course: site and instructor selection and evaluation. J Am Coll Surg. 2006 Nov;203(5):772-9. Epub 2006 Sep 20.

Loftus WC, Malmierca MS, Bishop DC, Oliver DL. The cytoarchitecture of the inferior colliculus revisited: A common organization of the lateral cortex in rat and cat. Neuroscience. 2008 Jan 19; [Epub ahead of print]

Müller-Doblies UU, Maxwell SS, Boppana VD, Mihalyo MA, McSorley SJ, Vella AT, Adler AJ, Wikel SK. Feeding by the tick, Ixodes scapularis, causes CD4(+) T cells responding to cognate antigen to develop the capacity to express IL-4. Parasite Immunol. 2007 Oct;29(10):485-99.

Vieyra-Reyes P, Picciotto MR, Mineur YS. Voluntary oral nicotine intake in mice down-regulates GluR2 but does not modulate depression-like behaviors. Neurosci Lett. 2008 Mar 21;434(1):18-22.

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