Animals on campus have stirred up students and faculty for many years.
Currently, 30 percent of research at the U requires lab animals, a number that has stayed generally stagnant over the past years, said Tom Parks, vice president for research at the university. Most of the animals come from commercial breeders, and about 95 percent are mice, zebrafish or rats.
To approve medical and surgical treatments for humans, research is performed on animals first. Parks said federal law requires new drugs and medical devices to be tested this way.
The most recent complaints of animal abuse on the U’s campus came from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in 2009. Undercover investigators shot video of U biomedical research facilities and filed complaints with the National Institutes of Health.
“They got someone hired into our animal facility under false pretenses and basically provoked and staged phony incidents that were then dropped on us in a press conference,” Parks said.
After investigation, the case was dropped. But it caused a big stir and some bad press for the U’s research labs.
Emmy Schneider was interviewed by The Daily Utah Chronicle in 2009 about the incident. As a member of PETA and a junior in mass communication at the time, she said the supposed animal cruelty undercovered in the labs was “disgusting.”
Going a little bit further into the U’s history reveals other, perhaps stranger, animal abuse cases.
“Mournful barks given intermittently led to the rescue last week of Leif, Great Dane pet of Dr. E. E. Ericksen, head of the Philosophy Department,” began a story published in The Daily Utah Chronicle in May 1948.
Apparently, the animal had not been fed or watered for five days, so students living in the Fort Douglas dormitory broke into a vacant building to rescue him. Ericksen said at the time that he did not know where his dog was and assumed he had chased a rabbit under the building. He then said the canine was not “philosophical enough to retrace his steps and get out.”
The Chronicle published a message telling students to look out for the dog. The Great Dane was allegedly a direct descendent of a dog owned by Leif Eriksson, an explorer who discovered America in the 10th century.
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