USDA issues citations to University of Utah animal laboratories

SALT LAKE CITY — A kitten died from dehydration as a result of too much medication, individual primates were neglected for days at a time, mice and Guinea pig cages were found to be overcrowded, and calves may have been exposed to painful situations for too long, but University of Utah officials maintain that none of the most recent animal-testing violations, released Wednesday by the United States Department of Agriculture, were intentional.

After animal rights activists conducted undercover investigations of university facilities last year, the USDA and the National Institutes of Health's Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare stepped in to determine if the U. was in violation of any federally regulated animal-testing requirements, which are fairly extensive. Their five-day, in-depth investigation took place in January and has resulted in warnings being issued to the U. to correct inappropriate behavior before the next routine investigation.

Since 2007, the U. has been found to be in total compliance with rules regarding the tightly regulated practice of animal testing in the U.S. However, the latest findings, brought on by PETA reports and public outcry, reveal a handful of violations U. Vice President of Research Tom Parks says are "relatively minor offenses."

"We have a reputation of running a good facility," he said. "If you look around long enough, you are going to find problems in any organization, and this is no different."

NIH, which provides funding for most of the animal testing at the U., reported that the U.'s program is "in very capable hands and in good order." The organization noted only one example of cage overcrowding, in which mice babies were not separated from their mothers in the two days required by research regulations.

The USDA report overlapped PETA's 2009 allegations in only a few instances, whereas PETA had delivered a list of dozens of items it believed constituted a violation.

Research institutions across the country that conduct animal tests are routinely investigated, and some are found in violation of various protocols and research procedures. The USDA website identifies recent instances and violations of animals living in their own waste at Stanford University, and outdated medications and food, as well as a dog that was burned by a lighting fixture at Yale University – both of which are institutions that house colleges of medicine much like the U.

Parks said a lot of what the USDA found during the most recent investigation at the U. were not results of improper care, but rather a failure to document certain actions performed by any one of the hundreds of researchers working with thousands of animals at any one of the U.'s 25 animal testing facilities.