Action Alerts

CAARE’s investigative team has revealed that Boston Children’s Hospital is killing mice and rats to develop an enhanced version of botulinum toxin, a product already in widespread use for cosmetic and medical use. More commonly recognized by one of its commercial names (Botox), botulinum toxin has a number of medical uses, including relief from migraines and nerve-related disorders. 

Please note: Congress requires that all signers provide a current U.S. address. Those outside the U.S. can sign a similar letter here.

As shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic extend indefinitely, universities and private laboratories are dealing with ongoing staff shortages and delayed research by killing thousands upon thousands of animals, mostly mice and rats. 

Yet as thousands of animals continue to be massacred, laboratories outrageously continue to breed more.  CAARE’s previous request to NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) asking for a breeding ban during the pandemic has been ignored, and we are now asking Congress to intervene.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) has released a Strategic Plan detailing its research priorities for fighting COVID-19.  Unfortunately, the plan recommends ineffective and cruel animal studies while omitting non-animal methods that can provide more efficient, human-relevant data. 

Please ask NIAID to stop wasting resources creating animal models and instead utilize superior, human-centric methods in the fight against COVID-19.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow, it has exposed a chilling disregard for animal life in labs across the country. To prepare for staff shortages, universities are ordering “extraneous” animals to be “euthanized.” Already, thousands of mice have been killed and the situation is likely to worsen as the crisis escalates.

Incredibly, labs are still allowed to keep breeding mice, even as they are being killed. Please send your polite letter to the NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare (OLAW) to ask that they immediately ban the breeding of mice and other animals while the country remains under lockdown due to the coronavirus.

For the estimated 300 million people around the world suffering from depression there is a need for safe, effective, therapies.  Sadly, vast resources go towards using animals to study depression, a macabre and unscientific pursuit in the guise of medical research.

A notorious example is the Forced Swim Test, in which researchers drop mice and rats into inescapable tanks of water and watch as they struggle to stay afloat. The animals, who no doubt experience tremendous fear and distress, are said to be depressed if they “give up” and stop swimming sooner than others.  This assumption is unfounded, as there are countless reasons why a mouse or rat might stop swimming. 

With news of vaping associated health problems growing, scientists are seeing this as an opportunity to expand animal research.

In response to the public health crisis involving e-cigarette or vaping associated lung injury, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has made the dire decision to use animals to study the role of vitamin E acetate and other potentially toxic compounds in e-cigarettes.

This decision is totally out of step with the current trend to reduce and eventually eliminate animal testing in regulatory toxicology studies.  

It’s been a bad year for scientists claiming that experiments on mice brains will produce human cures.

In the last four months, there have been two landmark publications describing unique features of the human brain that should – by all rational standards – halt all future brain research on animals in its tracks.

Please request that those responsible for millions of dollars in cruel and useless mouse experiments heed the results of these studies and stop experimenting on mice.

A CAARE investigation has revealed that John Hopkins University has been keeping monkeys cruelly confined in a laboratory to study the problem of human gambling.  We have learned that at least two monkeys, Aragorn and Isildur, have been used in invasive brain experiments, including extreme confinement. 

In Aragorn’s case, he’s been subjected to these experiments for nearly a decade.

As CAARE frequently reports, outstanding developments in science and technology are driving important advances in human medicine without the use of animals. Everything from cell-cultured organoids to 3D printing using human cells to sophisticated computer models are delivering results that are far more relevant to human health than animal experiments.