JIPMER Caught Illegally Experimenting on Animals, Faces Action From Government Following PETA India Complaint

For Immediate Release:

12 July 2022

Contact:

Ankita Pandey; [email protected]

Hiraj Laljani; [email protected]

Puducherry – After a concerned student alerted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India to cruel and illegal experimentation on animals taking place at Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research (JIPMER), Puducherry, the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA) sent a show cause notice to JIPMER’s director, demanding that the experiments be stopped immediately and warning of legal action against the institute. CPCSEA’s move follows PETA India’s complaint, which was submitted with evidence of the violation of animal protection laws. As per the student complaint received by PETA India, rats and mice were kept in miserable conditions – confined to severely crowded boxes and forced to eat food contaminated with fungus – in violation of CPCSEA regulations and guidelines. Furthermore, the animals were reportedly bred to overpopulation, and students were forced to perform experiments on them solely to reduce their numbers.

“Compassionate students across India have the power to hold their institutes accountable for breaking the law and tormenting animals in experiments,” says PETA India Science Policy Advisor Dr Ankita Pandey. “We applaud CPCSEA for taking action against JIPMER for conducting unauthorised animal experiments, and we appeal to all medical colleges in the country to replace the use of animals for dissection, training, and other experimentation with humane and superior, non-animal methods now.”

In its letter to CPCSEA, PETA India noted that JIPMER had not renewed its registration licence since 2012, yet continued to breed and conduct experiments on rats and mice and fund illegal experiments, even after CPCSEA cancelled its registration on 5 May 2022. The group pointed out that this is a direct violation of the Breeding of and Experiments on Animals (Control and Supervision) Rules, 1998, which prohibit breeding and experimenting on animals without CPCSEA registration. In its complaint, PETA India submitted evidence of cruelty and illegality by JIPMER through photographs, the Institutional Animal Ethics Committee (IAEC) circulars inviting research proposals using animals, minutes of IAEC meetings during which illegal animal experiments were approved, memorandums releasing research grants to support proposals involving animal experiments, and published research papers that discuss experiments conducted on animals by the institute during the past 10 years.

CPCSEA’s show cause notice also directs JIPMER to furnish details on the animals housed in the animal facility, details of experiments conducted on animals during the past 10 years, and the minutes of meetings of the IAEC, which approved the experiments on animals.

PETA India’s complaint and the notice from the member secretary of CPCSEA to JIPMER’s director are available upon request. PETA India – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA India, please visit PETAIndia.com or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

#