Life in a Laboratory
Imagine living locked inside a closet without control over any aspect of your life. You can't choose when and what you eat, how you will spend your time, whether or not you will have a partner and children, and if you do, who that partner will be. You can't even decide when the lights go on and off. Think about spending your entire life like this, even though you have committed no crime.

This is life in a laboratory for animals. It is deprivation, isolation, and misery.

Now consider all the specialized needs of the species imprisoned for experimentation. Chimpanzees, in their natural homes, are never separated from their families and troops. They spend hours together every day, grooming each other and making soft nests for sleeping each night. They are loving and protective parents, and baby chimps will live close to their mothers for many years. But in a laboratory, chimpanzees are caged alone. There are no families, no companions, no grooming, no nests. There are only cold, hard steel bars and loneliness that goes on for so many years that most chimpanzees sink into depression, eventually losing their minds.

Rats and mice are denied a place to dig and hide. Dogs and cats are deprived of exercise, affection, and the homes that they long for with families to care for them. Rabbits have no room to leap. Pigs cannot root in the ground or build their nests. Even when the cages are clean–and this is not always the case–the animals are not allowed to engage in any normal behavior.

On top of the deprivation, there are the experiments. Animals are infected with diseases that they would never normally contract–tiny mice grow tumors as large as their own bodies, kittens are purposely blinded, rats are made to suffer seizures. Experimenters force-feed chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires in their brains, crush their spines, and much more. Think of what it would be like to endure this and then be dumped back into a cage, usually without any painkillers. Video footage from inside laboratories shows that animals cower in fear every time someone walks by their cages. They don't know if they will be dragged from their prison cells for an injection, blood withdrawal, a painful procedure or surgery, or death. Often animals see other animals killed right in front of them.

While some facilities are better than others at caring for animals–not every lab employee kills mice by cutting off their heads with scissors, a practice that PETA documented at the University of North Carolina–there are no happy animals inside laboratories. Read about the hidden lives of some of the animals used in cruel experiments rats and mice and baboons. To learn more about the laboratories that PETA has exposed, http://www.peta.org/about/history.asp