Happy Howl-oween from the Rescue Freedom Project, BUILD IT!, Lawsuit filed against the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Optometry, PETA's Animal Test Challenge & a Teddy Bear Tackles Animal Tests are all in this week's Animal Testing Report!

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Labs that currently hold chimpanzees have been resisting transfers to the national chimpanzee sanctuary, Chimp Haven, citing space limitations and other excuses. Unfortunately, qualified sanctuaries throughout the U.S. are either full or near capacity, and they need to expand their facilities before being able to take in more residents.

Build It! 2018
Thanks to the support of AAVS supporters and others, construction is already underway at Chimp Haven, including multi-acre forested habitats, open-air corrals with climbing structures, moats for safety, and a new commissary for sanitary food prep. Importantly, there will be the addition of several dedicated veterinary suites, so chimps have stress-free access to medical care. But construction MUST be completed by the fall of 2019, and a significant funding gap remains.
The details we have are sparse — but the picture they paint is disturbing.
Cats and kittens, some as young as four months old, have their heads mounted in frames and their eyes forced open with contact lenses. While still alive, their skulls are removed so that electrodes can be inserted into their brains.
In any other setting, this would be animal abuse. And it’s going on right now behind closed doors at the State University of New York (SUNY) College of Optometry. We’ve filed a lawsuit, representing Citizens for Alternatives to Animal Research & Experimentation (CAARE), to compel the disclosure of SUNY’s records related to these experiments.
These cats suffer hours — possibly days — of traumatic, agonizing treatment.
We can’t stop experiments like these without more information. That’s why we need your help. 
Buckley, a chestnut-and-white spaniel, seemed smaller and less boisterous than his littermates – and by the time he was just a few months old, he began showing signs of illness. He struggled to chew and swallow his food, was racked by frequent coughing, and often collapsed in a heap after simply playing as any healthy puppy would. At about 6 months old, he was diagnosed with canine muscular dystrophy (MD), a painful and debilitating disease.
Rather than making him as comfortable as possible, his owner "donated" him to experimenters.
For the next five years, Buckley was shuffled between universities like a piece of laboratory equipment and used over and over again in painful tests.
Right now, animals like him are trembling in barren cages, suffering at the hands of experimenters. 
Buckley's story ends at Texas A&M University's (TAMU) notorious dog laboratory in the United States. He was plagued by a thick nasal discharge, congestion in his lungs, a heart murmur, and upper respiratory infections when he died as a result of complications from anesthesia. Experimenters then dissected his corpse and harvested his tissues for examination.
No animal should be made to endure the misery that Buckley did. Yet experimenters at TAMU and France's Alfort National Veterinary School are deliberately breeding dogs like him to suffer from canine MD. The desperately ill animals are used in tests that could pass for medieval torture—including stretching their muscles with a motorized lever to gauge how much they've deteriorated. When the dogs are not being tormented by experimenters, they struggle to walk, swallow, and even breathe—much like Buckley did—as disease ravages their bodies.
This year, countless dogs, mice, primates, and other animals will suffer in crude and cruel tests. But you can help them by donating to PETA's Animal Test Challenge. Help prevent animals from suffering in laboratories?
Decades of torturing dogs in hideous experiments at TAMU and other facilities have yet to lead to a cure for MD—or even a single treatment to reverse the disease's devastating symptoms in humans. While scientists know there are better ways to help those who suffer with MD—such as using cells to create disease-specific cures, transplanting healthy muscle cells into human MD patients, and establishing human-relevant drug-screening platforms—the cruel and pointless experiments have yet to end.
With your help, we're working determinedly to change that. We're inspiring thousands of caring people to join PETA's European affiliates in urging French charity AFM-Téléthon to cut its funding for dog experiments at Alfort National Veterinary School, and the pressure on TAMU to shut down its dog laboratory is growing by the day. PETA and our international affiliates are also helping to eliminate the use of animals in all kinds of experiments by funding the development and promoting the use of non-animal research methods.