Tag: Ohio

Animal Rights Activists Want Ohio University to Open Animal Care Review Committee Meetings

Ohio-based animal rights activists want Ohio University to open up its Institutional Laboratory Animal Care and Use Committee meetings, but the university has so far refused on the grounds that it is not required by law to do so and it does not want to set a precedent of opening meetings that it is not legally required to open.

Two groups, Ohio-based Protecting Our Earth’s Treasures and OU student group Athens Animal Rights Coalition, want the university to open the meetings.

Protecting the Earth’s Treasures’ Rob Russell told The Athens News that the meetings should be open because,

This is a federally mandated committee, at an Ohio public university.

Athens Animal Rights Coalition president Noelle Elbert told The Athens News,

They should be public. Other universities in Ohio have to go by the rules, and we don’t understand why OU doesn’t.

. . .

We’re concerned about the animals. Because what are they hiding, if they don’t want you to sit in on the meetings? . . . I pay to go to this school, so don’t I have a right to know what’s going on?

But Ohio University director of legal affairs, John Burns, noted that Elbert has been given copies of the minutes from all of the animal care committee meetings, as well as a tour of Ohio University’s animal facilities. “There has been a lot of information provided to her,” Burns told The Athens News.

Source:

Animal rights activists wonder what OU committee is hiding. Jim Phillips, The Athens News, November 24, 2004.

PCRM Wants an End to OSU's Spinal Cord Classes

Ohio State University, like a number of other institutions, offers a three week Spinal Cord Injury Training Course to familiarize students and professionals with the methods and techniques used in spinal cord research. Since much spinal cord research is animal research, the course includes instruction on techniques to injure the spinal cords of mice and rats.

Not surprisingly, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wants the courses shut down. In a press release urging activist to contact the university, PCRM said,

Ohio State University is offering what may be the most inhumane course ever taught: A class in injuring the spinal cords of rats and mice.

Participants in OSUÂ’s Spinal Cord Injury Training Course will be taught how to systematically injure the animalsÂ’ spinal cords by major surgery and blunt trauma. OSU rationalizes the course by claiming that more standardized techniques are needed among spinal cord researchers. The three-week course will subject 189 rats and 60 mice to multiple painful surgeries, laboratory procedures, and distressing behavioral exercises after the injuries.

The course is going forward even though nonanimal research on spinal cord injuries is yielding exciting results. For example, relevant data are being obtained through tests on human neural cell lines in culture, impact studies using human cadavers, clinical observations and trials, and other techniques that do not require the use of animals.

Of course PCRM leaves out any mention of the ground breaking work on spinal cord injuries currently taking place in animals (in fact many of the advances that PCRM refers to were possible thanks largely to the sort of basic research with animals that PCRM opposes here).

Sources:

Action Alert: Help Stop Inhumane Spinal Cord Classes at OSU. Press Release, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, June 11, 2004.

Experimental spinal cord injury (SCI) course. Press Release, Ohio State University, March 15, 2004.

Tamara Matheson Spends 15 Days In Jail for Disrupting Pharmaceutical Meeting

On March 24, Tamara Matheson was sentenced to 60 days in jail after pleading guilty to disrupting a holiday party at Forest Pharmaceuticals in 2003. Forest Pharmaceuticals has been a target of activists because it contracts some of its animal testing to Huntingdon Life Sciences.

Ohio officials, however, released her only 15 days into her sentence in order to alleviate overcrowding at the facility she was being housed in.