It was told during the Presidential Election season that Trump was cruel to animals and surrounded himself with those who were as well including crony capitalists in the Agriculture business. We, at The Conservative Papers, hoped Trump would not conduct himself this way as President, but now we have found out that the USDA has shut down its animal welfare database from its website. Cruelty to any being is not right and immoral. Conservatives have always been against cruelty.
From Ryan Merkley of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine:
I am writing with troubling news. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a new policy that will make it harder for citizens to find out how animals are used in laboratories and whether those facilities are complying with federal law. Without this information, it will be more expensive and time-consuming to track whether research is moving away from animal experiments and toward human-relevant studies. That means that animals are likely to suffer even more.
For many years, the USDA’s website included a searchable database of inspection reports for research facilities and other institutions regulated under the federal Animal Welfare Act. The database also included the research facilities’ annual reports, which allowed the public to see how many Animal Welfare Act-covered animals were used and by what species. But, yesterday, the USDA shut down that database.
The agency claims the decision was in response to its “commitment to being transparent, remaining responsive to our stakeholders’ informational needs, and maintaining the privacy rights of individuals.” All personal and location information was censored before documents were publicly disclosed, so it’s unclear how the wholesale removal of these records demonstrates a commitment to transparency or privacy rights.
In recent years, the Physicians Committee has used records from the USDA database to help shut down Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center. We also exposed violations of the law by laboratories housing chimpanzees, which increased public scrutiny and ultimately led to the federal government retiring our closest genetic relatives to sanctuaries.
USDA’s decision leaves organizations like ours no other option than to file requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a practice that can be time-consuming and costly. Even before yesterday’s announcement, FOIA requests to the USDA regularly took months to complete. Longer delays mean that information about how animals are used in laboratories and other federally regulated facilities will take even longer to see the light of day – delays that may require legal action in order to compel the USDA to release records.
The Physicians Committee’s program and legal teams are coordinating with experts outside the organization to devise an effective response to the USDA’s new policy. We pledge to keep you informed and to call on you to take action once that plan is in place.
From the Huffington Post:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has removed a slew of animal welfare data — including inspection records for institutions like zoos, laboratories and commercial breeders — from its website.
Previously, anyone could use a search tool on the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service website to look up such information. The general public, as well as animal advocacy groups and journalists, could use the search function to see whether facilities had violated animal welfare regulations.
USDA APHIS attributed the change to concerns about privacy, adding in its announcement on Friday that the decision had come after a year of “comprehensive review.”
“As a result of the comprehensive review, APHIS has implemented actions to remove certain personal information from documents it posts on APHIS’ website involving the Horse Protection Act and the Animal Welfare Act,” the agency said in a statement. “Going forward, APHIS will remove from its website inspection reports, regulatory correspondence, research facility annual reports, and enforcement records that have not received final adjudication.”
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The public deserves to have easy access to the information because taxpayer money funds the enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, Kate Dylewsky of conservation and animal rights group Born Free USA said in a statement obtained by The Dodo.
“The public has a right to know what the government is doing, and this is a blow to both government transparency and to animal advocates’ ability to hold animal abusers publicly accountable,” she said.
The information disappeared from the USDA website two days after Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.) introduced a bill to increase transparency surrounding taxpayer-funded animal testing.
One member of President Donald Trump’s USDA transition team, Brian Klippenstein, has a long history of fighting animal welfare regulations. Klippenstein is executive director of Protect the Harvest, a group that, among other things, has vehemently opposed legislation meant to fight abusive puppy mills.
It’s possible that this was decided by the Obama Administration and is just being done now, but we should protest this cruel decision no matter which administration is behind it. We recommend writing to the President and to your representatives in Congress to request that the USDA reverse their decision.
