Dear Editor,
A PETA eyewitness investigation of Liberty Research, Inc., a Barton contract laboratory that tests veterinary products on dogs and cats, has resulted in video footage and photographs showing that dogs and cats were denied adequate veterinary care, killed in slow and stressful ways, and not separated from other stressed animals, who injured them.
In response, PETA is calling on the company’s customers – including Merial, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and schools such as Michigan State University and the universities of Pittsburgh, Florida, and Louisville – to reconsider commissioning experiments at the facility and purchasing animals from the company’s breeding site just outside Waverly.
In experiments sponsored by companies such as Bayer and Merck, dogs and cats were injected with drugs and exposed to viruses and then killed or used for additional tests. A worker drilled into the skulls of 30 dogs – some of who hadn’t been adequately anesthetized and whimpered during the process – and injected distemper virus into their brains. An insecticide and massive doses of an opioid were also injected into dogs, even though well-established animal-free testing methods exist for these substances.
“These dogs and cats are just like the ones who share our homes, and Liberty Research should be shut down for treating them like pieces of disposable laboratory equipment,” says PETA Research Associate Dr. Emily Trunnell. “PETA is calling on Liberty Research customers to review our evidence and decide whether they will continue to fund this hellhole.”
In the laboratory, cats were kept in severely crowded, barren conditions in windowless buildings. A cat named Jade, who was left briefly paralyzed by seizures, was left without care for nearly four weeks before a worker finally gave him a fatal injection in his heart – while he was possibly still able to feel pain. It took other workers more than seven minutes and four injections to kill a fully conscious, gasping, and bloodied dog.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
Sincerely,
People for Ethical Treatment of Animals
There is no excuse for tormenting animals in experiments, especially when advanced, non-animal methods could be used instead. I hope that institutions will cut ties with this cruel place, which apparently views living beings as nothing more than research tools to use and abuse.
Animal Testing is very wrong in 2017. This is something from the Barbaric past. We are capable of so much information and new testing does not involve animals. This is not something this society wants. We are caring people who are horrified what ahppends to the voiceless.
Please shut this sickening, sadistic mone-grubbing shop of horrors down!!! For all of you who ‘work’ here, may you suffer the karma you well should. I have NEVER heard of anything as gruesome and horrible, as I humane and terrible as this place. May you all rot in hell and may the animals you brutalize, terrorize and murder RISE UP and may you suffer the same fate.
I am contacting the customers of Liberty – Novartis, Merck, Bayer, Merial, Zoetis, Mich State U, Universities of Pittsburgh, Florida and Louisville.
It makes me sick to see these pictures. Can’t get them out of my head. These defenseless beautiful creatures of God and nature are abused and tortured systematically and systemically. There is probably big money in conducting this research. And if Liberty doesn’t do it, these companies will go overseas to Asian countries to conduct their research on animals. This barbaric, antiquated method of using beautiful innocent animals for their torturous research methods has got to stop.
Not everyone knows what kind of torture these precious animals are going thru,the word
Has to get out to everyone,so we can ALL speak for the Cats and dogs who cannot.then
The horrible people who do these unspeakable acts of cruelty to animals are
Prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.