Posted for Meredith Wadman

Turns out that there’s a government-induced mistake in the numbers underpinning a recent ad campaign by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. (See PETA’s website and press release and our coverage). It attacks the US Food and Drug Administration for abusing dogs. PETA’s numbers were skewed by a data-entry error at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the agency that issues official numbers on animal use.

PETA had calculated that in 2006, the latest year for which figures are available, about 65,000 dogs were sacrificed in the United States for pharmaceutical research. That number was predicated on total dog use for all purposes of 87,424—- a number arrived at by totaling the USDA numbers in each category.

But a data entry error in the USDA report – picked up by sharp-eyed folks at the the Foundation for Biomedical Research — elevated 2006 dog use in Wisconsin by an order of magnitude. The number of dogs in the “no pain, no [pain] medication” category was reported as 24,109. It should have been 2,999. Correcting that reduces total 2006 dog use to 66,314 and pharmaceutical dog use to about 48,400.

PETA says it will correct its number just as soon as USDA corrects its own on its website (where the server is down as I write this.) “It is frightening that the USDA’s incompetence is matched only by its indifference to the suffering these numbers represent,” says Jessica Sandler, the director of PETA’s Regulatory Testing Division.

“We will post an amended report to our Web site very soon with a brief explanation of the error,” says Jessica Milteer, a USDA spokeswoman.