PETA Global Issue 3

INDIA

Saved! Animals Pulled out of Deathtraps

A MESSAGE FROM Ingrid Newkirk PETA’s President

Trapped and frantic, a spectacled cobra swam in circles at the bottom of a 50-foot well. Death was certain – until a crew arrived from Animal Rahat, a PETA supported veterinary and emergency animal-care program in Maharashtra, India. The group’s emergency responders regularly risk life and limb to rescue animals who’ve tumbled into crumbling open-pit wells – from dogs and cats to pigs and wildlife. It took three hours, but the team finally hoisted the 4-foot-long snake to safety and released her into a forest.

On a hot summer day in July 1985, 101 nervous PETA members – pretending to be part of a tour group – filed into the elevators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) headquarters and headed to the eighth floor. Catching the staff by surprise, they raced into the offices and sat down, refusing to budge until the agency had agreed to cut off funding to the notorious head-injury laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. Experimenter Thomas Gennarelli was receiving nearly $1 million a year fromNIH to cement baboons’ heads into helmets, connect them to a hydraulic device, and thrust them sharply forward with an acceleration of up to 1,000 units of g-force (15 can kill a human being). The baboons were supposed to be anesthetized for the “bang,” as experimenters called it, but more than 60 hours’ worth of video footage taken from the facility by the Animal Liberation Front showed that animals were struggling and trying to lift their heads when they should have been unconscious. Experimenters were also shown making fun of baboons who were so brain-damaged that they could only drool and stare vacantly. One grinning worker mocked an injured baboon, saying, “You’re gonna rescue me from this, aren’t you? Aren’t you?” Laughing staffers posed with injured animals, describing one primate with an incision down the middle of his skull as having “the punk look.” And another said, “You’d better hope the anti-vivisection people don’t get ahold of this film.” But PETA did. PETA submitted copies of the footage to the US Department of Agriculture, which recommended that all the animals be removed immediately. But “investigations” by NIH and university officials (some of whom had worked in the lab) were a farce. That is how I found myself sitting on the floor inside NIH’s headquarters that summer. That sit-in captured media interest worldwide. Seventy-seven hours after PETA’s protest began, the government announced that it would end all funding to the cruel head-injury clinic. We’ve come a long way since then: High-tech simulators for studying crash injuries are now the gold standard. But other painful, pointless experiments on animals continue, and PETA will keep fighting them until every laboratory cage is empty.

Using ropes, ladders, nets, tranquilizers, and ingenuity, an Animal Rahat staffer recently saved two dogs who were stuck on a narrow ledge in another well.

When a call came in about a cowwho’d been treading water for nearly two hours after falling 70 feet down a well, Animal Rahat was on the scene in minutes with a hydraulic crane and industrial lifting belt. Two staffers were lowered down in climbing harnesses, strapped the belt around the exhausted cow, then signaled for the crane to lift her to safety. She emerged without a scratch. Every rescued animal is given a thorough examination and veterinary care if needed, and dogs are sterilized and dewormed. There are hundreds of abandoned wells in this area, so Animal Rahat’s rescue services are invaluable.

UK & USA

PETA p aced this billboard on a busy road between a massive chicken hatchery and a s aughterhouse in Ohio – both notorious for their rotten smell – and also offered to pay to p ace it on public toilets in Eng and and Wales that were in danger of being shut down for ack of funds. In addition to the foul odor, waste from farmed animals contributes to air pollution. The methane gas that the animals emit is the single argest source of global methane emissions – and 25 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide is. Their waste also releases ammonia that, when combined with car exhaust and smoke from coal-fired power p ants, creates smog. People who live near pig farms frequently suffer from asthma and other respiratory problems caused by liquid manure sprayed on surrounding fields.

Read riveting accounts of daring animal rescues from aboratories in Free the Animals by Ingrid Newkirk. Order at PETACatalog.com . I

2 GLOBAL NEWS