A new article has surfaced about class B animal dealers ("random source" animal dealers who have often been under fire for stealing animals and selling them to laboratories). Yates says he used them in earlier research of his. The article mentions that he is now working to also include animals from shelters in his research. As if homeless pets already don't have it difficult enough, Yates would like to operate on their brains and put them through more hell for his interests.
Let us remember that NO ANIMAL regardless of pet status or species deserves to spend a life of suffering in a laboratory. Yates' abuse of cats is equally abhorrent as his use of rats. Neither cats nor rats deserve to be viewed as objects rather than living beings. Using and promoting the use of random source, possibly stolen, pets in research is obviously worth noting as well. And with the already short time animals have in kill shelters and pounds (24 hours to a week depending on location) we can guarantee that time would become shorter if research interests and money became more involved.
The article quotes a "Larry Yates" but there is no Larry Yates doing research on cats at Pitt. Only Bill Yates does this and is using a different name for some reason... See article below:
There was a time when it was common for dogs and other pets to be stolen or sold by pounds to dealers who put them into monstrous holding kennels before reselling them to scientific researchers.
Those practices have dwindled in the four decades since outrage from the well-publicized plight of a few dogs brought about the nation's first federal law to protect animals used in biomedical research in 1966.
At the heart of the Animal Welfare Act was concern that pets might be stolen or otherwise acquired by dealers and quickly sold to labs with no chance for rescue or adoption, and that animals bound for research would be badly cared for.
That was the saga of Pepper, a beloved Dalmatian stolen in 1965 from her Pennsylvania home and killed in an experiment at a Manhattan hospital before her family could track her down.
Her story, reported in Sports Illustrated and a photo exposé in Life Magazine of the awful conditions endured by dogs collected for research at a Pennsylvania kennel with the headline "Concentration Camp for Dogs," rallied congressional support to protect at least some species of research animals.
Today, the overwhelming number of all animals used in research — including dogs and cats — are specifically bred for that purpose. Most medical experiments use animals that are standardized and often genetically modified to mimic some human disease or condition.
Only about 0.05 percent of all animals used in biomedical research are dogs and cats, but that total is still more than 90,000 animals a year — with an estimated 3,000 or so collected by a dwindling number of "random-source" dealers.
There are still experiments where scientists say a few stray or donated dogs or cats are needed.
"There are certain diseases and conditions, arthritis or metabolic disorders, for instance, where you need to study an older animal. But hardly any breeders keep an animal beyond six months," said Dr. Larry Yates, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who used random-source cats in his early work, but no longer does. [emphasis ours] He also served on a National Academies of Science committee that examined the secondary market for research animals in a report issued last year.
Although regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the 10 or so random source or "Class B" dealers still operating have come under heavy criticism from inspectors, congressional investigators and animal protection groups in recent years for problems ranging from poor animal care to sloppy record-keeping intended to ensure no stolen animals are used in labs.
"The government inspectors are still spending a huge amount of time to manage this small group of dealers, and we have to wonder about the institutions that are still supporting this practice," said Sue Leary, president of the American Anti-Vivisection Society.
Just in March, one of the dealers, a kennel near Shippensburg, Pa., [this "kennel" is still open but is hopefully going downhill] was charged by federal prosecutors with illegally buying hundreds of dogs from small breeders in at least 10 states for $50 to $75 an animal, giving them false documentation and veterinary certificates and then reselling them to researchers for hundreds of dollars each.
Aside from the dealers, research institutions in 33 states may negotiate with local pounds to acquire animals. In Minnesota and Oklahoma, state law allows researchers to demand that animals be turned over to them. Utah lawmakers just abolished such a requirement.
Sixteen states, including Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia, and the District of Columbia have laws that forbid pounds to turn over animals to research.
In the remaining states, pound and shelter policy is dictated by county or city government, not the states. In California, however, all counties have policies banning the sale or donation of animals for research.
Animal protection advocates in many areas have challenged city and county agreements to sell animals to labs, but say these arrangements still bring in about a quarter of all the dogs and cats used annually in research.
J.R. Haywood, a researcher and vice president for regulatory affairs at Michigan State University in Lansing, who works with rats and baboons in his own diabetes research, still supports continued access to pound animals, although he concedes that the dealers have proved a poor source. He noted the practice has "about disappeared in Michigan" although there is no statewide ban on the practice.
"It is ironic that while researchers have reduced the number of cats and dogs we use by half in the past several decades by changing methods or using other animal models, there are still hundreds of thousands of those animals being sacrificed in pounds every year because no one will adopt them," Haywood said. "Wouldn't it be better if we could learn something from them that would help people and animals from them before they're put to sleep?"
Yates and Haywood said there have been discussions about setting up research consortia to obtain and care for pound animals [emphasis ours], as well as a plan to have the National Institutes of Health establish breeding colonies where dogs and cats could be kept long enough to develop some of the traits that only come with age, but no specific plans have been made.
