Reports on NIRC Lab

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued several recommendations on how it believes conditions and activites can be improved at UL’s New Iberia Research Center.

A team of four USDA inspectors visited NIRC on March 17, after the Humane Society of the United States called for an investigation into the center.

A USDA report on the visit listed the following findings:

There was not a standard operating procedure in place regarding injecting animals with a dart, or enough documentation to allow the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee review such procedures.

There was not a standard operating procedure in place to acclimdate animals to pole-and-collar procedures.

There was not someone monitoring animals that had been sedated because of medical treatment.

There were concerns about transporting chimpanzees from their primary enclosures by grabbing them on all four limbs.

There were some primates with abnormally short tails that had been amputed because of trauma or frostbite.

There was not enough documentation about animals being housed alone while they are under study.

NIRC Director Thomas Rowell said the center has already addressed some of the issues raised in the report and continues to evaluate its operating procedures to make further improvements.

For more on this story, see Wednesday’s edition of The Daily Advertiser."

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