Here’s a roundup of the week’s biggest news stories related to animal research — all the recent media coverage you need to know right now to be the most effective activist for animals in labs.
State Regulator Defends Dog Torture at Her Family’s Business
Rise for Animals, 5/20/2025
We and The Marty Project caught a Wisconsin state regulator defending Ridglan Farms, the massive dog-breeder-and-researcher — without disclosing the whole truth about her deep, personal ties to the business. 📰 Full Story →
Suppliers of Suffering: The Breeders Selling Lives to Labs
Rise for Animals, 5/22/2025
Behind every animal experiment is a supplier breeding lives for profit. These companies hide cruelty behind feel-good language and polished branding, but we’re exposing the truth they don’t want you to see. 📰 Full Story →
OHSU defends controversial primate research center: ‘If we didn’t have to use animals, I wouldn’t’
Kyle Iboshi, KGW8, 5/16/2025
“The director of Oregon Health & Science University’s primate research center admits the last few months haven’t been easy. A medical ethics group launched an advertising blitz against the research center. Oregon’s governor called for the facility to shut down. And the Trump administration’s effort to slash research grants has put funding in jeopardy.”
“‘The research that the public wants to invest in and wants to see conducted doesn’t involve monkeys in a cage.’ said Dr. Neal Barnard of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine . . . ‘It’s an old-fashioned science and we really can do better.’”
“More than 10,000 Oregonians petitioned for the center to shut down, and Oregon Governor Tina Kotek publicly urged OHSU to plan for a humane closure, although her authority is limited.” 📰 Full Story →
ℹ️👇 For more related to this story, be sure to check out the following article.
Physicians Committee Complaint Calls on OHSU to Suspend Decades-Long Alcohol Experiments on Nonhuman Primates
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, 5/19/2025
“‘The cruel experiments that OHSU is spending tens of millions of dollars on — creating binge-drinking monkeys and intoxicating pregnant monkeys to study the effect on their fetuses — don’t provide insight into how alcohol consumption affects humans,’ says Neal Barnard, MD, FACC, president of [PCRM]. ‘The alcohol experiments at the Oregon National Primate Research Center must be shut down and investigated immediately.’”
“The complaint cites seven experiments that involve inducing alcohol dependence, withdrawal, and repeated relapses; it also cites examples of human-based research that answers the studies’ questions without the use of animals . . . More than 1,000 human-relevant studies have already investigated alcohol use disorder.” 📰 Full Story →
Opinion: The end to animal testing marks the beginning of better biomedicine
Ellen P. Carlin & Jason Paragas, STAT, 5/19/2025
“Animal models have become obsolete. We are now moving away from animal testing toward surrogate systems based on human biology. No longer will our medicines be gated through animals, but rather through entirely human systems — leading to breakthrough options for the humans that need them.”
“Animal models are often flawed and offer incomplete representations of human disease . . . These animal tests have been required since the middle of the last century as proof of concept that the drugs will help and not hurt people. But the requirement was never based on a scientific rationale that animals would provide predictive models for drug interactions with human physiology.” 📰 Full Story →
Commentary: An inconvenient truth – Animals always die in laboratories
Dr. Katherine Roe (PETA), Bradenton Herald, 5/19/2025
“Amid the recent cuts to research funding, animal experimenters are very publicly complaining that if their funding is cut, they will have to kill the animals in their laboratories. Here is what they are not telling you: They were going to kill these animals anyway.”
“There are about 100 million animals caged in U.S. laboratories right now. That number includes cats, dogs, mice, rats, monkeys of all types, guinea pigs, horses and pigs. Every one of these animals is marked for death upon arrival at a facility. If they end up in a laboratory, they will die, almost without exception. The only difference is that typically, these animals are killed after experimenters have carved into their skulls, injected them with chemicals, inflicted unimaginable pain and fear on them, damaged their brains, surgically mutilated them, kept them on the brink of dehydration or nearly starved them, kept them in solitary confinement inside cages barely big enough to hold them or subjected them to any number or combination of such workaday horrors.”
“Don’t be fooled by the phony tears of animal experimenters who are suddenly pretending to care about the animals they torment. These experimenters want to save their funding, not animals . . . animal experimenters currently whining to the media don’t care about the animals in their laboratories. If they did, they wouldn’t torment them in pointless experiments in the first place.” 📰 Full Story →
Physicians’ Consortium Urges NIH to Investigate Arizona State University for Alleged Research Misconduct
Scienmag, 5/20/2025
“In a significant development that has sparked debate within the biomedical research community, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) has formally lodged a complaint against Arizona State University (ASU)” calling “for an immediate investigation into the ethical and scientific justification of ASU’s use of mice in studies examining the effects of dietary supplements, specifically choline, on adults with Down syndrome.”
“The complaint centers on the premise that ASU’s decision to use animals, particularly mice, in studying dietary choline supplementation runs counter to established federal policies advocating for the replacement of animal models where feasible. Choline, a nutrient well-documented for its safety and efficacy in human clinical research, including studies involving individuals with Down syndrome, does not warrant invasive animal experimentation . . . The research employed highly invasive methods including brain implants and involved terminal procedures where the animals were euthanized to collect brain and liver samples for analysis. The procedures imposed significant distress and harm to the animals….” 📰 Full Story →
Report uncovers disturbing truth behind monkeys sold for ‘corrupt’ industry: ‘There can be no dispute’
Sara Traynor, TCD, 5/20/2025
“If this report is correct, it seems that the biomedical research industry fuels this illegal trade of endangered species for animal testing.”
“Lisa Jones-Engel, a primate scientist with PETA, said in an email to Mongabay that the biomedical research industry is clearly complicit in supporting ‘a transnational criminal network that illegally sources wild primates for the violent and corrupt international primate trade.’” 📰 Full Story →
National scientists group asks National Institutes of Health to investigate study that resulted in deaths of 100 animals
PCRM, EurkAlert!, 5/21/2025
“The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a complaint . . . with the [NIH]’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare requesting an investigation of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center’s study of the effects of ginger root extract on pain in rats.”
“For the experiment, 100 rats were divided into two groups that underwent different surgical procedures. They then received either ginger extract or corn oil as a control . . . ‘The intervention in this case, ginger, has been consumed by humans and regarded for its health benefits for thousands of years,’ Stephen Farghali, research advocacy coordinator for [PCRM] wrote in the complaint. ‘Human studies … not animal studies, are needed to move the science forward,’ he said.” 📰 Full Story →
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