VICTORY: FDA enacts lab animal retirement policy following WCW campaign
In late 2018, 26 squirrel monkeys were released from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lab after White Coat Waste Project successfully shut down a wasteful $5.5 million nicotine addiction experiment on the primates. Now, even more survivors will have a chance to make it out of FDA testing labs alive.
As first reported in The Hill, following pressure from WCW and bipartisan lawmakers, the FDA has enacted its first-ever, agency-wide policy allowing dogs, primates, and other lab survivors to be retired after experiments.
The FDA move comes after more than 1.2 million WCW advocates joined the #GiveThemBack campaign and asked the agency to retire lab animals. The policy breakthrough also follows the introduction of the AFTER Act in the House by Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-PA), Jackie Walorski (R-IN), and in the Senate by Susan Collins (R-ME), and Gary Peters (D-MI). The bipartisan bill would require all federal agencies to allow lab survivors to be adopted out to taxpayers or retired to sanctuaries.
Squirrel monkeys before and after being retired to a sanctuary from the FDA nicotine testing lab shut down following a WCW campaign
The FDA experiments on over 2,000 primates, rabbits, and other regulated animals each year. Yet, other than the 26 monkeys released from the now-defunct nicotine lab, the agency has not retired any other survivors. This new policy will change that.
The new development is especially timely because, in December 2019, Congress enacted historic WCW-backed legislation directing the FDA to develop a timeline and plan for the reduction of testing on primate tests and their retirement to sanctuaries. The new policy provides a framework for the relocation of primates as more of this wasteful testing is cut.
The FDA joins the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as the only federal agencies to have animal retirement policies.
Contact your lawmakers and tell them to pass the AFTER Act to require all federal agencies that do animal testing to create retirement policies for animals!
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