Animal Defender With Muscular Dystrophy Wins PETA US Award for Saving Dogs From Texas A&M Lab
Animal Defender With Muscular Dystrophy Wins PETA US Award for Saving Dogs From Texas A&M Lab
Norwich – A Hero for Dogs Award from PETA US is on its way to Johnathon Byrne, an animal defender from Norwich with muscular dystrophy (MD), who helped PETA US shut down the notorious canine MD laboratory at Texas A&M University. The institution has said it will release the remaining healthy dogs for adoption by the end of the year.
During the six-year PETA US campaign, Byrne flew to Texas to rally with other PETA US supporters outside the Texas A&M president’s office and the School of Veterinary Medicine and disrupted an alumni event in San Antonio at which Michael Young, the university president at the time, was a keynote speaker. When Byrne requested to see the dogs used for experiments in Texas A&M’s laboratory, he was detained by police, banned from campus, and then held again at the airport before he flew home. Byrne also appeared in ads that went up in Post Oak Mall and across Houston calling for an end to the tests on dogs, which had continued for 40 years despite failing to produce a cure for MD.
“Thanks to Johnathon Byrne’s heroic determination and compassion, these sweet and trusting dogs will finally have loving homes after enduring agonising pain in Texas A&M’s laboratory,” says PETA US Vice President Dr Alka Chandna. “PETA encourages anyone moved by Johnathon’s inspiring example to speak up for animals in need and support humane, animal-free research.”
Texas A&M has ended its canine MD breeding programme, shut down the laboratory, and released 60 dogs unaffected by the disease for adoption. PETA US first exposed the laboratory in 2016, when it released video footage revealing that golden retrievers and other dogs were being bred specifically to develop a crippling form of canine MD that humans don’t acquire. The dogs were used in painful experiments that involved biopsies and a device that stretched their muscle tissue. Video footage shows them chewing on their cage bars with no comfortable place to lie down.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview – offers a free vegan starter kit on its website. For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk or follow the group on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Contact:
Jennifer White +44 (0) 20 7837 6327; [email protected]
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