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Mice's toes amputated without pain relief, unsterile operations conducted on pigs, animals with tumors languishing in pain—these are just some of the horrors that PETA has uncovered at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston.
And now, PETA is calling for the removal of the school's attending veterinarian, among other changes. We need your help to keep the pressure up.
Appalling violations of animal welfare provisions were revealed in federal documents obtained by PETA from the National Institutes of Health. The documents show an astounding 41 violations in just 13 months.
To stem the tide of misery, PETA is calling on BCM President Paul Klotman to sack attending veterinarian Rebecca Schwiebert and urging the school to replace all members of its Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), the body charged with ensuring protections for animals used in the school's laboratories. The committee is clearly asleep at the wheel.
What PETA Found
Numerous mice subjected to experimental surgeries were left to suffer and die without the proper painkillers or with painkillers that had expired. Reports show that BCM staff amputated the toes of baby and adult mice without anesthetics or permission from the IACUC.
In one case, experimenters opened mice's skulls but failed to give adequate pain relief following surgery. In another incident, a mouse undergoing invasive surgery started to regain consciousness because of improper anesthetic technique.
One report detailed that experimenters didn't even use sterile techniques while performing surgery on mice and piglets. And two rabbits died as a result of complications caused by improper setup of the anesthetic machine.
Three mice used in a tumor study weren't monitored adequately, and the tumors on their bodies had become larger than the size that had been approved—likely causing the animals extreme agony.
Here's What You Can Do
Please take action today and help PETA keep the pressure on BCM to fire its attending veterinarian and replace the members of the animal welfare oversight committee with people who actually care about the well-being of animals. The shocking violence against and needless suffering of animals at BCM is both sickening and entirely preventable.