HARTFORD MARATHON FOUNDATION and RINGLING BROTHERS CIRCUS . . . RUNNING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION

As activists and runners, we were disappointed to learn that the Hartford Marathon Foundation has chosen to support Ringling Brother’s Circus and their use of animals through sponsorship of the Red Nose Run. The Red Nose run is a public relations event created by Ringling Brother’s Circus to promote their business and counter the increasing public concern over abuse of animals in the circus.

Many of you are likely aware of recent and extensive media attention exposing the inherent cruelty of circus animal acts. In response to increased public awareness, legislative action in numerous states has focused on the abuse endured by captive animals such as tigers and elephants. We have come to realize that the exploitation and captivity of these amazing creatures are not only inexcusable, but that such treatment reflects the most base and cruel aspects of human conduct.

The wonder and awe with which we view these creatures come from the recognition that they are complex animals with desires and joys of their own. Elephants, like humans, are intelligent and social creatures that live their lives traveling in family groups. The ‘use’ of these animals for petty display and entertainment robs them of their natural existence and robs the children who view them of the notions of respect and compassion that we strive to instill. To date more than sixty municipalities in the US and Canada have banned circus animal acts.

Surely, there are more humane and educational opportunities for HMF to pursue as fundraisers for local groups and organizations. In a letter dated April 15th, 2008, we requested a meeting with HMF board members to express our concerns and offer detailed information regarding Ringling, its practices, and the lives of animals used for entertainment purposes.

We hope that HMF will grant our request.

Please take a few minutes of your time to contact Hartford Marathon Foundation and ask its board members to end sponsorship of the Red Nose Run and their support of animal exploitation.

Remind HMF that humans are not
the only species that
enjoys running free in the warmth of the sun.

Contact the Hartford Marathon Foundation at: info@hartfordmarathon.com

Board of Directors , 140 Hebron Avenue, Glastonbury, CT 06033 Tel: 860-652-8866

"All good things are wild, and free." Henry David Thoreau






For more information about the lives of circus animals, visit these sites (please note, CT for Animals does not necessarily endorse these sites or these organizations):

Born Free USA - associated with the Animal Protection Institute

Circuses.com - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Circuses - Humane Society of the United States

Mercy for Animals

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WWAIL 2008 Pt. II: Vivisection: As unscientific as it is cruel

Hundreds of millions of animals suffer slow, painful deaths at the hands of experimenters at Universities, hospitals and private institutions every year in the U.S. The existing federal regulations do not require that experimenters use alternatives to animals when they are available, they provide only minimal husbandry standards for some animals in laboratories and they do not even cover mice, rats, birds and reptiles (who make up more than 95% of all animals in labs). As a result, billions of our tax dollars are squandered on mislead research that entails confining, mutilating, drugging, and fatally infecting animals with degenerative and infectious diseases in the experiments that will do little, if anything, to improve human health. Continue below for recent research on the failure of animal experiments--

• A 2007 article concluded that research has “demonstrated that animal experiments are insufficiently predictive of human outcomes to provide substantial benefits during the development of human clinical interventions, or in deriving human toxicity assessments.”
  
• A 2008 article stated that the successes claimed by proponents of animal experimentation are anecdotal and that sweeping statements about the benefits of animal experimentation are unfounded.
• A 2007 article published in the British Medical Journal reported that the “lack of concordance between animal experiments and clinical trials may be due to…the failure of animal models to adequately represent human disease.” Similarly, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in concluded that "patients and physicians should remain cautious about extrapolating the findings of prominent animal research to the care of human disease."
• The FDA reports that only 8% of all drugs progressing to human trials after demonstration of safety in animal studies will gain approval. Further, roughly 50% of these approved drugs will be withdrawn or receive black-box warning labels after showing side effects or toxicities not detected in animals.
• In a 2007 report commissioned by the EPA, the National Science Foundation's National Research Council (NRC) concluded, "Current [animal toxicity] tests...provide little information on modes and mechanisms of action...and little or no information for assessing variability in human susceptibility." The NRC concluded "that a transformative paradigm shift [toward non-animal test methods] is needed to achieve the design criteria set out in the committee's interim report:... (2) to reduce the cost and time of testing, (3) to use fewer animals and cause minimal suffering in the animals used, and (4) to develop a more robust scientific basis for assessing health effects." Based on these concerns, the NRC advocated for a new approach to toxicity testing based on exclusively "computational biology and a comprehensive array of in vitro tests based on human biology."
• Still unconvinced? Try here, here and here.
  

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WWAIL Pt. 1: CT events for World Week for Animals in Labs

This week, Connecticut Activists will protest cruel experiments on mice, monkeys, cats, pigs and other animals at Yale University, the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC) and Hartford Hospital in recognition of World Week for Animals in Laboratories, a global event intended to raise awareness about the suffering of hundreds of millions animals:

Tuesday April 22

1:30 – 2:30 p.m., Yale University, 300 George Street, New Haven

Thursday April 24

1:30 – 2:30 p.m., University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington Entrance, Farmington, CT

3:30 – 5 p.m., Hartford Hospital, Hospital Entrance at 80 Seymour Street, Hartford

Click "read more" for further information about the suffering of animals at these institutions and for more information about how you can help.

Yale University

At Yale University, experimenter Marina Picciotto has received more than $15 million of taxpayer money since 1996 for experiments in which she forcibly exposes mice and rats to nicotine by injecting it into their abdomens, placing it directly into holes cut into their skulls or feeding them only water laced with the drug, forcing them to either drink it or die of dehydration (Addy and others 2007, Vieyra-Reyes and others 2008). The animals are then killed by decapitation while fully conscious and their brains are removed to study the effects of the drug exposure. Some of her studies involve hanging mice by their tails from paper clips supposedly to observe if exposure to nicotine effected anxiety and depression-like behaviors (Vieyra-Reyes and others 2008). In other studies by Yale experimenters, monkeys are captured in the wild, isolated in a laboratory, injected with antipsychotic drugs and killed to study their effects on the animals' brains (Elsworth and others 2007).

Take action- Click here to help stop nicotine experiments on animals (link will be live after 1pm on 4/22)

University of Connecticut Health Center
On any given day, there are 9,000 animals suffering inside of UCHC, including kittens who have plastic tubes forced down their throats, rats and cats who have holes drilled into their skulls (Loftus and others 2008) and mice who are locked in cages and have their entire bodies intentionally infested with ticks (Müller-Doblies and others 2007). UCHC is well-known for abusing animals in labs and in January 2008 was ordered to return $65K to the National Institutes of Health for more than 20 violations of animal welfare laws in a monkey laboratory.

Take action- Click here to help permanently end cruel training course at UCHC

Hartford Hospital
Each month, Hartford Hospital conducts a live animal trauma training course (Advanced Trauma Operative Management, or ATOM) in which pigs must suffer through fourteen penetrating injuries such as stab wounds to the abdomen and chest, stomach, inferior vena cava, and heart (Jacobs and others 2006). At the end of the one-day course, the pigs are killed. This month's course is on April 24th, the day of our protest.

Take action- Click here to help end cruel training course at Hartford Hospital

References
Addy NA, Fornasiero EF, Stevens TR, Taylor JR, Picciotto MR. Role of calcineurin in nicotine-mediated locomotor sensitization. J Neurosci. 2007 Aug 8;27(32):8571-80.

Elsworth JD, Jentsch JD, Morrow BA, Redmond DE Jr, Roth RH. Clozapine normalizes prefrontal cortex dopamine transmission in monkeys subchronically exposed to phencyclidine. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2008 Feb;33(3):491-6.

Jacobs LM Jr, Luk SS, Burns KJ. Advanced Trauma Operative Management course: site and instructor selection and evaluation. J Am Coll Surg. 2006 Nov;203(5):772-9. Epub 2006 Sep 20.

Loftus WC, Malmierca MS, Bishop DC, Oliver DL. The cytoarchitecture of the inferior colliculus revisited: A common organization of the lateral cortex in rat and cat. Neuroscience. 2008 Jan 19; [Epub ahead of print]

Müller-Doblies UU, Maxwell SS, Boppana VD, Mihalyo MA, McSorley SJ, Vella AT, Adler AJ, Wikel SK. Feeding by the tick, Ixodes scapularis, causes CD4(+) T cells responding to cognate antigen to develop the capacity to express IL-4. Parasite Immunol. 2007 Oct;29(10):485-99.

Vieyra-Reyes P, Picciotto MR, Mineur YS. Voluntary oral nicotine intake in mice down-regulates GluR2 but does not modulate depression-like behaviors. Neurosci Lett. 2008 Mar 21;434(1):18-22.

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Friday, 4/18: Leafletting event at Yale University

Think you can be a meat-eating environmentalist? Think again! "[The meat industry is] one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."
-The United Nations

Come and leaflet at Yale at the 2008 Conference of Governors on Climate Change! The main events are Friday, April 18 (tomorrow):

10:00 AM @ Yale Law School Auditorium, 127 Wall Street, New Haven
(The Governor Discussion begins at 10:30)

1:00 PM @ Woolsey Hall Auditorium, 500 College Street, New Haven
(The Global Issues Address begins at 1:30)

Look for Sean, who will be there with the PETA "Chop Chop" flyer and Vegan Outreach literature to distribute to attendees. And keep an eye out for the Governator!

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Mad Cowboy: A Lecture by Howard Lyman

Mad Cowboy: A Lecture by Howard Lyman

With a catered vegan reception
Free and open to all!

Sunday, April 13, 7:30 PM

Room 127, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street

Howard Lyman, aka "The Mad Cowboy," gained international recognition as Oprah Winfrey's co-defendant in the infamous "meat disparagement" trial (www.madcowboy.com/). He is a former fourth-generation rancher and farmer who walked away from it all to advocate "not only for our health but for our nation's sanity as well." Howard is the past president of both the International Vegetarian Union and EarthSave, as well as the author of Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat. Howard will relate the powerful personal story of his transformation from unhealthy carnivore into one of the world's top vegetarian advocates.

Sponsored by Animal Legal Defense at Yale Law School and Catch a Healthy Habit Cafe (West Haven)

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Sat 4/5/08: Protest Yale presentation for kids about the "fun" of vivisection!

ON ACCOUNT OF THE OUTPOURING OF DISMAY FROM ACTIVISTS, THE 4/5 LECTURE BY VIVISECTOR MARINA PICCIOTTO HAS BEEN CANCELED. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

Email Science Saturdays and thank them for choosing compassion over cruelty:

Patricia Wooding, Coordinator of Science Saturdays
patricia.wooding@yale.edu
203.436.8105 (office)

Contacts:


Why we protested against Marina Picciotto's experiments on animals:

This Saturday, Yale University’s Science Saturdays series will be hosting a presentation by a Yale mouse vivisector, Marina Picciotto, who will teach children about her experiments in which she forcefully exposes mice and rats to nicotine and other drugs and then kills them by decapitating them in order to study the effects of the drug on their brains (you can read the announcement here). Some of her studies involve hanging mice by their tails from paper clips to observe the effects of nicotine exposure on their physical activity, and others entail exposing pregnant female rats to cocaine to induce brain damage in their pups and then placing the pups in cages where their feet are repeatedly shocked. All of the animals are killed by decapitation in these studies as well.The press release that was issued in conjunction with the event states that goal of these lectures is “to remind ‘kids of all ages’ that ‘science is fun’ and the photo accompanying the announcement depicts Picciotto playfully holding a mouse in her hand. However, this depiction is a false representation of the reality of animal experimentation and there is nothing fun about “science” that involves the confinement, mutilation and killing of thinking, feeling animals. Yale should be promoting ethical, progressive science, not cruelty to animals under the guise of “fun.” Modern, human-based research using non-invasive brain imaging with fully-consenting humans is ethical, incredibly fascinating to learn about and has been invaluable in our understanding of how the human brain reacts to substance abuse.

Research has shown that many students in all phases of their educational careers are uncomfortable with the use of animals in scientific research and that these effects can be long-lasting. Exposing young people to animal experimentation as “science” can foster a callousness toward animals and nature and even dissuade some students, especially females, from pursuing careers in science (even in fields that do not entail the use of animals).

On top of all of this, it is only insult to injury that Picciotto’s studies force animals to carry the burden of humans’ poor lifestyle choices. Animals are not disposable tools that we have the right to exploit to fulfill the whims of any scientist, or for anyone else’s benefit or curiosities. Mice and rats have rich lives all their own, and these lives should be respected, not violated because they are different. The animals suffer greatly, both psychologically and physically, as a result of being used for experimentation.

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NIH orders UConn to return $65K in grant funds

UConn Told To Return Funds

Violations Of Animal Welfare Rules Prompt Order Against Health Center

By GRACE E. MERRITT |Courant Staff Writer
January 25, 2008

The National Institutes of Health has ordered the University of Connecticut Health Center to return some of the grant money given for brain experiments on monkeys, because of violations of animal welfare regulations.

The federal agency asked UConn this week to return $65,005 of the grant because of violations in the primate lab, where researchers drilled holes into monkeys' skulls and implanted steel coils into their brains to record eye movements for a neuroscience experiment.

Read entire article here.

Read another story from the UConn Daily Campus here.

Editor's note: These kinds of administrative actions should not be viewed as ends within themselves (since the law merely regulates the systematic exploitation of animals in labs), but means by which to hold animal abusers in laboratories legally accountable (since they are unconcerned with the moral implications of their violent work) and keep the discussion of animal rights in the open. JG

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