animal welfare – Memphis Flyer

A University of Memphis (U of M) research laboratory violated numerous federal protocols concerning the care of test animals over the last year resulting in numerous animal deaths and a national animal welfare group wants the lab investigated and penalized.

The violations were found during a routine inspection of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in August. Agents with that group found nine violations in the lab, which is not specifically identified in the report.

View the report here:

PST_Inspection_Report_UNIVERSITY-OF-MEMPHIS Download

It is unknown how many animals are in the lab. The report does list at least 270 mole rats. But for scale, consider that the Memphis Zoo with its vast menagerie had no violations during its inspection in the same time frame, and neither did other research facilities like the University of Tennessee Health Science Center or St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

A federal group, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), oversees animal welfare in research settings. It produces protocols for which laboratories must adhere to test on animals.

One of the U of M lab’s major violations of these protocols came on April 1^st this year. The building’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) broke overnight, causing higher temperatures and a lack of ventilation in a room containing animals. When lab attendants returned to the lab, they found 12 dead voles, which are small rodents related to hamsters.

The report says U of M did not have an alarm or monitoring system in place at the time to warn of ventilation problems. The lab fixed the problem before the August inspection.

Other critical violations for the lab came as “animals [were] simply found dead, suffering with broken bones, or missing a limb. One vole was euthanized for having a swollen, red, hairless, left, front limb.” Lab officials could not tell inspectors what research study the animal was on, nor could they find any care records for it after attendants found it injured.

Further, a mole rat was discovered missing a “rear leg from a fight with other voles.” The animal was euthanized. On another occasion, voles were discovered with a broken rear leg, a hurt leg, and an eye swollen shut. They were euthanized “due to fight wounds on the head and face.” The report says the animals may have been agitated because lab attendants put a noise-making dehumidifier in the room and left the lights on in the room around the clock. Both issues were corrected, the report says.

Another, simpler protocol mandates daily observations of lab animals. However, during the August inspection the “assistant director stated that this is not being done and has not been done in a long time.”

Another violation said the lab did not list exactly how many animals it had. It also incorrectly listed species of animals it had.

“The facility submitted an annual report for [fiscal year 2021] which listed 217 common mole rats,” reads the report. “The associate director stated that the facility did not have any common mole rats in [fiscal year 2021], instead they had approximately 270 ‘Damaraland mole rats’ which are a different species than common mole rats.”

“Amassing a total of nine federal violations, including three criticals, clearly shows that the University of Memphis is the worst lab in the U.S.”
SAEN co-founder Michael Budkie

For this and more, the national group Stop Animal Exploitation Now! (SAEN) filed a federal complaint and wants the lab investigated further and fined at the national maximum of $10,000 per violation.

“Amassing a total of nine federal violations, including three criticals, clearly shows that the University of Memphis is the worst lab in the U.S.,” said SAEN co-founder Michael Budkie. “University of Memphis staff apparently can’t tell when animals are sick because they are just found dead, and even when they determine an animal is seriously ill and needs to be euthanized, they can’t even find the veterinary records.”

Facebook/MAS

In mid-March, Memphis Animal Services (MAS) said it had a crisis capacity and urged the public to step up and foster or adopt pets.

But since then, Alexis Pugh, executive director of MAS, said there has been an “amazing turnout” from the community with fostering and adoption and that the shelter’s population has significantly decreased.

Pugh says in order to keep the population size down at MAS, staff have shifted their focus on ways to help the community without having to bring animals into the shelter: “Capacity is quite low and manageable as we look to ways to rehome pets outside of the shelter.”

Over the past couple of months, Pugh said MAS has been doing more community intervention than it ever has in the past. This shift is “long overdue in animal welfare,” she said.

“Not every animal needs to come through the shelter to find a new home,” Pugh said. “The animal welfare community has been talking about this for a long time, but it almost needed some kind of trigger moment to make it happen.”

Part of this community intervention strategy includes working with people to keep pets in their home. This means providing education and resources, Pugh said.

For example, MAS implemented a pet food supply pantry to assist families who lost their income and the ability to buy the necessary food for their pets. So far, MAS has served 180 families with 5,000 pounds of food.

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MAS has also ramped up its effort in the field to reunite lost pets with their owners.

“We don’t want to return to our pre-COVID-19 normal because we were overfull all the time and animals were being put to sleep because of space,” Pugh says. “We’re trying to get to the point where our capacity to care is better aligned with what we really should be providing animals.”

The key to this is getting the community involved in the process of rehoming animals. Pugh said this depends largely on neighbors helping neighbors.

“If you have a pet that you can no longer care for, can you seek resources through people who are in your life?” Pugh said. “Everyone has social media now, so that can be used to find a home for pets. Or if someone finds a stray animal, can they foster it until they can find a home for it? We’re here to be an aid and a resource for this.”

The typical model of going into a neighborhood and picking up stray animals might not be the best strategy for long-term success. Pugh said for years MAS has gone to the 38127 ZIP code and picked up stray animals, but that area still remains the highest intake ZIP code.

“Going out and picking up stray animals is not the solution to long-term success,” Pugh said. “Instead we need to be using our resources to support the community making sure everyone has access to spay and neuter services and that cost isn’t a barrier. We want people to have access to vaccines and the knowledge that will help them care for their pets. If we really want to see long-term change in the community, we have to stop spinning our wheels picking up animals and overfilling the shelter.”

Pugh said MAS wants to adopt more of an emergency room model for pets so that every animal does not have to go through the shelter to find a home: “We were forced into this change, but there are definitely long term benefits to us changing the model.”

With the population at MAS more manageable, Pugh said staff has the chance to get to know the pets there better and are able to be more successful at matching people with pets for adoption.

The bottom line, Pugh said, is that a shelter is “no place for a pet.” It’s not ideal housing for dogs or cats and being in a kennel does not fit their social needs, she explains.

“We want to be more of a resource agency and not just a shelter for unwanted pets,” Pugh said. “So the challenge comes as we try to get the public to adapt to that new model. Any time, you talk about changing a model, there is going to be fear and hesitation.”

Measuring Success

MAS’ save rate for March was down to 81 percent from 90 percent in February. The national target and goal for MAS is 90 percent.

However, Pugh said that number doesn’t accurately reflect the agency’s productivity, explaining that because the shelter has limited intakes to emergency cases due to COVID-19, the animals currently in the shelter are in the at-risk population for euthanasia.

“We don’t have those friendly, healthy stray dogs in the shelter because now the team is focused on animals that fit into two categories,” she said. “The first is animals who have injured someone or have aggressive behavior. And those animals are not safe to rehome. Secondly, we’re taking animals with medical emergencies. While we do our best to save them, many are beyond medical intervention.”

Pugh said she has been in talks with animal shelter directors around the country who agree there needs to be a more inclusive way of tracking data and the success of shelters.

“I can think of five animals off the top of my head that we recently found homes for that never came into the shelter,” Pugh said. “But this isn’t counted in the save rate data. The data has to do a better job at capturing community interventions.”