PETA and Alliance for Animals Say Animal Fighting Law Applies to All Wisconsin Animals
For Immediate Release:
June 9, 2011
Contact:
Robbyn Brooks 202-483-7382
Madison, Wis. — PETA and the Alliance for Animals (AFA) have filed an urgent complaint with Dane County District Attorney Ismael R. Ozanne calling on him to investigate and file criminal charges against faculty and staff at University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) who are responsible for staging fights between mice as part of a series of cruel experiments. In the complaint, the groups point out that a Wisconsin cruelty-to-animals law (Wis. Stat. § 951.08) prohibits instigating fights between dogs, roosters, or any other animals—with no exemption for animals in laboratories. Even though it is considered a felony to violate this law, UW experimenters have forced hundreds—possibly thousands—of animals to fight for more than a decade.
"Mice feel pain and fear, just as dogs do, and they're protected by the same law—yet while dogfighters are punished with jail time and felony charges, UW faculty have been rewarded with millions of taxpayer dollars to fund their cruelty," says PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. "There's no difference in the law, and there should be no difference in the prosecution."
Former Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard previously found that UW had violated the law by killing sheep in painful decompression experiments and that the experiments were not exempt from the cruelty statute. UW narrowly escaped prosecution over the animal deaths and was reprimanded by a special prosecutor assigned to the case for the university's failure to review experiments for compliance with state law. UW is currently making efforts to exempt its experimenters from all state anti-cruelty laws—including forcing animals to fight—with new language quietly slipped into the state budget bill.
PETA's and AFA's letter to Dane County District Attorney Ismael R. Ozanne is available upon request. For more information, please visit PETA.org.