NYU Fails to Protect 10,000 Animals From Sandy

It wasn’t as if experimenters at New York University (NYU)
didn’t know for days that Hurricane Sandy was approaching. It wasn’t as if they
didn’t know that federal policy requires them to at least try to protect the animals they torment and kill in experiments
from also becoming victims of a natural disaster. But the experimenters either made
no evacuation plan for the animals in their “care” or they failed to
follow through with it. Instead, they abandoned 10,000 mice and rats in a basement laboratory, who remained trapped in their cages as the floodwaters rose. Many animals—panicked,
afraid, and desperate to escape—drowned to death, while others suffocated from
the toxic diesel fumes of a leaking fuel tank. NYU was unable to give an exact
figure for the number of animals who died—remarking instead that the facility
lost 7,660 cages of mice and 22 cages of rats, with each cage holding
one to seven animals. 

PETA has
filed a complaint with the National
Institutes of Health, the government body that oversees federally funded
experiments, calling for an investigation into NYU’s irresponsible and
unconscionable actions and inaction. In our complaint, we pointed out that the
university will likely acquire
thousands more animals to replace those who died, multiplying the
suffering caused by the experimenter’s negligence.

It’s not the first time that animals were left trapped in
laboratory cages during natural disasters. At the University
of Texas Medical School
at Houston, 35 dogs,
78 monkeys, 300 rabbits, and 4,000 mice and rats
drowned during tropical storm Allison in 2001. The storm also killed 30,000
mice and rats who were left in the basement at Baylor College of Medicine. Hurricane
Katrina killed 8,000 animals trapped in Louisiana State University’s
laboratories, and thousands more died at Tulane.

An
official with the National Academy of Sciences remarked: “This happens
again and again and (research labs) never learn. Anybody with half a brain
knows you do a site-specific analysis [to understand the risk of disasters],
and it’s really stupid to put your animals in the basement if you’re in a flood
zone.”

Stupid,
cruel, and inexcusable.