PETA protesters lit up yet another Texas A&M University (TAMU) Board of Regents meeting as they stole the show to call for an end to the university’s wasteful and archaic muscular dystrophy (MD) experiments on golden retrievers.

The protest comes in reaction to a disturbing video PETA released, which shows emaciated dogs at the TAMU laboratory living in barren cages and struggling to walk, swallow, and eat. Those who don’t exhibit symptoms but carry the gene for canine MD are used for breeding—and the footage revealed that they were left to gnaw on their cage bars and pace frantically on the hard, slatted floors.

Over Three Decades of Torturing Sick Dogs

For 35 years, TAMU experimenter Joe Kornegay has been experimenting on dogs he’s deliberately bred to develop this painful and crippling disease. In all this time, he’s failed to produce a treatment to reduce symptoms of—let alone cure—MD in humans.

This institution claims that its core values include integrity and leadership. It’s time for it to live up to this claim, because at the moment, PETA and compassionate people the world over can’t help but wonder if it simply enjoys tormenting dogs.

This board meeting debacle is just the latest among many PETA ad campaigns, disruptions, protests, and other actions to save these dogs from intolerable misery and agony. Our campaign has included support from scientists who have criticized the experiments as having no relevance to humans and from MD patients who ask that such cruelty not be carried out in their name. TAMU has felt so overwhelmed by the pressure by those outraged at its MD experiments that the college has lied at least once about ending them.

Take note, TAMU, and listen closely: We’ll never give up on the dogs you continue to torment in useless experiments. No one, regardless of species, least of all those whom we hail as our “best friends,” deserves to be bred into a life of suffering just to feed a false hope.

With the help of PETA supporters, we’re keeping the pressure on the university to end the experiments and shut down the laboratory.

Please, join PETA in urging the university to close its dog laboratories, stop breeding MD–afflicted dogs, and release all dogs for adoption into good homes.