Jun 20, 2008

From SmallAnimalChannel.com

University Labs Seek Homes For Small Animals
Rescue organizations re-home 300 California and Pennsylvania lab animals.
By Rachael Brugger

When California State University, Northridge, shut down professor Donna Hardy’s comparative psychology lab, she was faced with a huge dilemma. For 39 years, she and her students observed behaviors in small animals such as guinea pigs, mice, rats and hamsters, but with the close of the lab the small animals were left without a home.

The newly formed lab animal rescue organization, New Life Animal Sanctuary, took in more than 250 animals, including these two guinea pigs, from the California State University, Northridge.

“What were we going to do with them?” Hardy said. Because the animals belonged to the state of California, Hardy said she couldn’t give them to people.

Not wanting to harm the small animals, she, with the help of a student, got in touch with the New Life Animal Sanctuary, a recently formed organization in California dedicated to providing a safe place for lab animals. Gina Lynn and Allison Lance, co-founders of the organization, are currently working to find homes for Hardy’s 250 lab animals.

“We originally thought, ‘Oh that’s crazy. Labs aren’t going to turn animals over to us,’” Lynn said about starting the organization. “But since we started putting feelers out, we’ve come across quite a few people that have some connections, and everybody is certain that it’s not going to be a problem. And we’re finding already that it isn’t.”

Current Status of The Animals
So far, New Life Animal Sanctuary, with the help of other rescue organizations around the state, has found homes in Southern California for about 100 of the small animals. However, they still have a lot of work before them because the original count of 250 animals has grown to more than 300 since the birth of two litters of mice.

Debra Mendelsohn of the Animal Care and Adoption Network in the Bay Area volunteered to coordinate the fostering and adoption of about 50 animals heading to the northern part of the state in late June.

“I’ve got a pretty good base of networking people and also shelters,” Mendelsohn said. She will run the operation out of the Marin Humane Society where she volunteers once a week. “I will have my adopters meet there if they can, and the ones that can’t, I’ll foster short-term until I can get them to their permanent homes.”

People interested in adopting one of the lab animals can fill out an adoption application found on the New Life Animal Sanctuary website. Lynn and her team screen all prospective parents to ensure they will be a good fit for the small animals. They call veterinarian references, which candidates must include on the application, and try to make home visits to evaluate the environment that the small animal will live in.

During the process Lynn said she also warns the potential adopters that she cannot guarantee the health status and longevity of the animal’s life, because they come to her with no background information.

“We don’t know what happened to these animals,” she said. “We don’t know what kind of stress they’ve been under and how that might be affecting them.”

Meeting Rules And Regulations
However, according to Hardy, the conditions that she kept her small animals in were highly regulated, with special attention being paid to their food consumption, bedding and environment temperature.

“All university animals or animals in any facility that get federal funding are highly regulated by the federal government,” she said.

CSUN’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee meets twice a year and a university veterinarian visits the small animals regularly to make sure they are properly taken care of, Hardy said. She also had to fill out research protocol forms and notify the state of the type of research she was performing on the small animals.

Hardy said one of the biggest challenges she faced in turning over the small animals to New Life Animal Sanctuary was complying with the Animal Welfare Act, which the agriculture department uses to regulate the treatment of lab animals.

“Since the forms for the protocol had no provisions for placing [the animals] outside of the university, we didn’t know what to do,” she said. “[The compliance officer for the university] stepped in, she got a hold of the head veterinarian at the Department of Agriculture and got him to agree for us to give these animals to the sanctuary.”

Fortunately, other than putting in lots of time cleaning cages and preparing to care for the small animals – an average of 12 hours a day for more than a month – approval from the state was one of the only obstacles that stood in the way of New Life Animal Sanctuary receiving the animals. Through the help of volunteers and other rescue organizations, Lynn and Lance received donations for much of the supplies and money needed to run the operation.

This being the spearhead project to the newly formed organization, Lynn said they still have much to learn. But as attention to ethical treatment of animals is heightened, she foresees the re-homing of lab animals to become more prevalent.

“A lot of people have been very receptive to the idea of adopting lab animals and excited about the idea of giving lab animals a new chance at life,” she said.

Saving Animal Lives In Pennsylvania
Across the country, in Pennsylvania, a group of 56 lab rats from Arcadia University faced a similar plight.

The university contacted The Humane League of Philadelphia to help re-home lab rats that they otherwise would have had to euthanize. The league’s director, Nick Cooney, said they have been working with the university for three years, and had more rats this year to find homes for than they have in the past.

“It was slow getting started,” Cooney said, who tried to reach people through the organization’s newsletter, rescue listservs and MySpace. “When we first put the word out, we received a very small number of replies, but after word spread more, especially on rat e-mail listservs and MySpace, we started getting more and more replies.”

He was able to find homes for all the rats, with more potential adopters ready to take some in. Lynn even offered to house any rats unable to find homes at her sanctuary.

Growth In Learning And Education
For her, starting an organization to cater specifically toward lab animals has been her way of contributing to the animal rescue community. The idea of vivisection – the experimental operation on a living organism – is what fueled her cause.

“I have been involved in many protest activities over the years, and I wanted to find a gentler more educational approach,” she said. “I think the sanctuary came to my mind as the perfect opportunity to save animal lives and also educate people.”

To her knowledge, only one other organization focused specifically on lab animals exists – the Kindness Ranch in Wyoming. Once Lynn obtains nonprofit status, which she is currently working on filing for, and secures a facility, she hopes to open her services to include large animals and primates in addition to small animals.

“We are learning a lot,” she said. “This is our inaugural rescue and we have learned a lot about what we could do better in the future.”

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