Nosey the elephant has not had an easy life. Born in Zimbabwe in 1982, she was stolen from her wild family at age 2 and brought to Florida.
Date created: March 23, 2018
Last updated: March 23, 2018
Two bills were introduced to curb cruel, costly, and dangerous wildlife management methods. In May, Reps.
Date created: August 30, 2023
Last updated: April 17, 2024
The US Department of Agriculture hearing against Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. (SCBT), scheduled for early April, has been pushed back to August 15—the fourth time over the past two years that the hearing on SCBT’s alleged egregious violations of the Animal Welfare Act has been delayed.
Date created: May 24, 2016
Last updated: January 15, 2020
The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) lauds the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for reaching a settlement agreement in its multiple cases against Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. (SCBT)—one of the world’s largest research antibody suppliers—resulting in the cancellation of the facility’s research registration, revocation of its dealer license and payment of a historic $3.5 million civil penalty.
Date created: May 20, 2016
Last updated: February 2, 2022
This week, the USDA's case against Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. (SCBT) is scheduled to be heard by an administrative law judge. The USDA case against SCBT is unprecedented: it is the first time that three separate complaints for willful violations of the Animal Welfare Act have been filed and are pending against a research laboratory.
Date created: January 14, 2013
Last updated: January 11, 2022
Alabama is known for many things, including beautiful Gulf Coast beaches, the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, steel, peanuts, the music of Muscle Shoals, and college football. It is also home to one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. In Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System, author Ben Raines—who has covered Alabama and the Gulf Coast region for 20 years as an environmental reporter—weaves a story about the geology, history, ecology, and destruction of the Mobile River Basin, a 44,000-square-mile collection of hardwood forest, cypress swamps, wetlands, and grasslands that provide habitat to an abundance of birds, insects, amphibians, mammals, and other reptiles and invertebrates, including new species identified every year.
Date created: June 10, 2021
Last updated: April 17, 2024
The Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act would prohibit the slaughter of horses in the United States for human consumption, as well as the export of live horses for the same purpose.
Date created: September 28, 2011
Last updated: August 30, 2024
Saving the Pryor Mountain Mustang: A Legacy of Local and Federal Cooperation, chronicles the lengthy and evolving struggle of one local community to preserve an isolated wild horse herd on the Wyoming/Montana border.
Date created: September 18, 2015
Last updated: April 24, 2024
A tragedy is unfolding in Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California. Fatal entanglements in shrimp and fish nets—many of them cast by poachers—are driving the world’s smallest cetacean to extinction.
Date created: September 18, 2015
Last updated: January 9, 2020
As whales go about the business of being whales—feeding, defecating, migrating, and breeding—they provide vital ecological services to the planet. This includes fertilizing the plankton that provide half of all oxygen on Earth and sequestering millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere in their massive bodies. The economic value of these services was the topic of a groundbreaking recent report by Dr. Ralph Chami, an International Monetary Fund economist.
Date created: January 2, 2020
Last updated: February 24, 2021
The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was passed in 1972. Over the years it was amended, but its fundamentally protective nature has remained unchanged. The statute outlawed the killing of any marine mammal, with limited exemptions.
Date created: December 17, 2018
Last updated: December 17, 2018
The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) welcomes the action taken by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in filing a second complaint against one of the world’s largest research antibody suppliers, Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. (SCBT). The complaint, filed November 4, alleges additional violations of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) from September 26, 2012, through April 22, 2014. Importantly, the complaint also requests the suspension or revocation of SCBT’s dealer license, a serious potential consequence given that USDA policy requires both a research registration and a dealer license for such labs to sell animal-derived antibodies.
Date created: November 10, 2014
Last updated: February 2, 2022
The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), a USDA agency, is amending its Animal Handling and Welfare (AHW) requirements for companies that supply meat from cattle, pigs, and sheep to the national school lunch program.
Date created: August 23, 2013
Last updated: January 15, 2020
Albert Schweitzer once said, “... all of us must feel the horror that lies in thoughtless torturing and killing.” In November, at the Hill Center in Washington, D.C., AWI awarded the Albert Schweitzer Medal to three state prosecutors who not only feel the horror, but aggressively confront those responsible - meting out justice to individuals who cause animals to suffer via acts of willful maliciousness, severe neglect, or the more organized and systematic brutality of animal fighting.
Date created: February 24, 2012
Last updated: February 9, 2024
Forensic analysis conducted by Dr.
Date created: January 3, 2022
Last updated: January 3, 2022
Located in upstate New York, Farm Sanctuary’s New York shelter is home to more than 500 rescued animals, including cows, pigs, and chickens. As described in a recent New York Times article—“Why Did the Chicken Cross the Barn?
Date created: June 21, 2023
Last updated: September 7, 2023
At the outset, the 15th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) stood to be historic and precedent setting.
Date created: July 9, 2010
Last updated: April 24, 2024
An independent scientific peer review panel has unanimously concluded that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) did not use the best available science to support its proposal to remove Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves across the contiguous United States (see Winter 2014 AWI Quarterly).
Date created: May 28, 2014
Last updated: January 9, 2020
I would not allow animals from this facility into my program. So stated Tracy Parker, president of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS), in a hard-hitting article by Meredith Wadman in late May in the prestigious
Date created: June 17, 2020
Last updated: June 17, 2020
The Animal Welfare Institute commends today’s announcement by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics that the red wolf is a “distinct species.” As detailed in the National Academies’ report, “Evaluating the Taxonomic Status of the Mexican Gray Wolf and the Red Wolf,” some of the country’s leading geneticists, taxonomists, and canid experts determined that this finding was the most plausible of the taxonomic options under consideration and that red wolves are distinct from coyotes and gray wolves.
Date created: March 28, 2019
Last updated: February 7, 2022
Scientists are finding more creative—and less invasive—ways to identify dangerous pathogens in wild and domestic animals.
Date created: April 3, 2023
Last updated: April 7, 2023
On July 1, 2019, the National Institutes of Health awarded Johns Hopkins University’s Veit Stuphorn another major grant to study the neural mechanisms involved in risk-taking in monkeys. In year one of this new five-year grant, Stuphorn will receive $498,000. This is on top of the $4.4 million he was awarded in prior years.
Date created: October 11, 2019
Last updated: January 23, 2020
As the previous AWI Quarterly was going to press, we received the stunning news of a USDA settlement with Santa Cruz Biotechnology (SCBT) with respect to allegations of repeated and egregious violations of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA).
Date created: September 16, 2016
Last updated: January 15, 2020
While other baleen whales have been extensively studied, the Bryde’s (pronounced "broo-dus") whale remains a bit of a mystery.
Date created: December 6, 2011
Last updated: January 8, 2020
It has been estimated that the current global species extinction rate is 100 extinctions per million species per year—1,000 times higher than the normal background rate (De Vos et al. 2014). Dr.
Date created: September 3, 2020
Last updated: September 3, 2020
