UCSF Agrees to Pay Large Fine to Avoid Hearing on USDA Animal Welfare Charges
$92, 500 Fine is One of Highest Ever Levied Against a Research Institution

Washington, DC - The University of California San Francisco has agreed to pay $92,500 to settle a legal complaint filed last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture alleging 75 violations of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) in UCSF's animal research labs between 2001 and 2003. It is one of the highest fines ever levied against a research institution by USDA.

UCSF had hired the powerful Washington, DC law firm of Covington and Burling, which defends Big Tobacco and the oil and pharmaceutical industries, to fight the charges. After publicly denying the "vast majority" of allegations and requesting a public hearing, UCSF settled the case Friday. The move enables UCSF to avoid evidence of federal violations in open court hearings, which had been scheduled to begin October 4.

"The cowardly settlement of this case just over a week before the hearing demonstrates clearly that the UCSF fears a public airing of evidence of animal abuse in its laboratories," said Elliot M. Katz, DVM, founder and president of In Defense of Animals (IDA). "The level of this fine indicates that the gravity of UCSF's animal welfare violations is indeed great, as USDA had charged."

Among the USDA's allegations: performing a craniotomy on a monkey without post-surgical analgesia; subjecting at least one monkey to multiple injections of a brain-destroying chemical through the carotid artery; and performing surgery on a ewe and her fetus without post-surgical pain relief. The violators include some of UCSF's top investigators, including: Henry Ralston, Kris Bankewicz, Michael Merzenich and Jeffrey Fineman.

In the settlement, UCSF neither admitted nor denied the allegations, a condition which IDA's Katz called troubling: "UCSF has been in almost continual violation of the Animal Welfare Act since 1998, according to USDA records, yet the institution has yet to acknowledge wrongdoing. Any claims that UCSF has fixed its problems are therefore unsupported. The fact is that animals continue to suffer and die in UCSF's labs."

In 2000, UCSF paid a stipulated penalty of $2000 to USDA for AWA violations, bringing the total fines paid by UCSF for animal welfare transgressions to $94,500. IDA is aware of only two other instances in which such steep fines were levied against research labs. In 1995, New York University agreed to pay $450,000 to settle USDA charges for Animal Welfare Act violations in its labs ($25,000 went to USDA; $425,000 went to a now-defunct chimp lab where NYU dumped its chimps). And, in 2002, the University of Connecticut agreed to pay $129,500 to settle USDA charges.

IDA - an international animal rescue and advocacy organization based in Mill Valley, CA - will have a presence on the UCSF campus each day this week to publicize the university's animal abuse and violations of the Animal Welfare Act. For more information on the UCSF situation, see http://www.vivisectioninfo.org/ucsf/index.html.

Click here to read the settlement document. (PDF file)