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.
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.
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.
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.
The Save America’s Forgotten Equines (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
AWI is very pleased to report that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has denied a permit application by Georgia Aquarium and partners (including SeaWorld and Shedd Aquarium) to import 18 wild-caught beluga whales from Russia for the purposes of public display.
