Stanford: Animal Rights on the Farm, and the law school group, Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, held a series of events and protests, an annual event to highlight the suffering of animals used in research and testing. The students demands were modest: accountability for animal welfare violations, transparency of the procedures and animals used, shifting funds toward alternative models of research, and stopping some of the most gruesome experiments, such as the cocaine addiction studies on juvenile monkeys. ARF and SALDF have a new petition, urging the administration to implement some of these reforms. There were three protests, a talk on "Why Progressives should care about animal rights," and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had an animal liberation exhibit on campus.

UCSF: In Defense of Animals (IDA) joined with Vigil For Animals to protest the University of California, San Francisco's (UCSF's) use of dogs and other animals in controversial, taxpayer-funded medical experiments. These experiments include pumping hundreds of dogs' hearts to high speeds to cause heart attacks, puppies injected with drugs to cause their nerves to malfunction, monkeys having metal plates bolted onto their skulls and their eyes cut open with scalpels, monkeys restrained by the neck and waist to prevent their hands from reaching their heads for five hours a day five days a week, paralyzing infant monkeys and cats, and on and on. This past October UCSF paid one of the largest fines ever for Animal Welfare Act violations after the U.S. Department of Agriculture charged the lab with 75 counts of animal welfare violations. By educating the public and keeping pressure on the university to operate with greater transparency, the groups hope to help end what they call the pointless suffering of these exploited animals.

Stanford Events Report and Photos

UCSF Demo Report and Photos | More on UCSF's Lab

World Week for Animals in Laboratories

Past Indybay Coverage of Stanford's Animal Labs: 1 | 2
Past Indybay Coverage of UCSF's Animal Labs: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4