Sogrot

"Sogrot" ("Closing" in Hebrew) is a group acting to close down places that abuse animals. Our strategy is to focus on one target at a time and take all legal means to end its activity. We are inspired by actions taken by international group SHAC.

These days an animal experiments laboratory is being built in the basement of the Behavior studies campus of the "Tel-Aviv Jaffa Academic College", where hundreds of animals will find their death each year. The animals that will be brought to the lab are facing injuries such as pain causing, defect casting, burning, shock and trauma producing, starving, drugging and brutal deaths. The lab will be used for research by the lecturer staff and some of the students in the Psychophysiology field.

Animal experiments are an old, cruel, incorrect and immoral method. More advanced and moral methods exist for many years and are used for teaching as well as for research, in many respected institutions all over the world. There is no justification to open a laboratory where cruel experiments on animals will be held.

The chairman of the College, Prof. Nehemia Friedland has admitted that the purpose of the lab is not to explore a certain field, but to encourage the Psychology department lecturers to continue to perform research so that "they will not dry out" in his words. A private available research lab would have been legitimate if hundreds of innocent animals were not hurt in the process.

The head vivisector of the laboratory will be Prof. Ronit Avitsur, a lecturer in the campus for Psychoneuroimmunology. Avitsur has been performing cruel experiments on animals for a decade, that their intention is to intentionally harm the bodies and souls of animals to show a connection between emotional stress and durability of the immune system. Her last research that was published, at the end of 2005, described baby mice that were separated from their mothers during the time of one day to two weeks old. After they grew up they were infected with a virus and their immune system's response was measured. In other researches Avitsur daggers mice in each other in purpose of causing emotional damages and later check the mice's function (for example their healing ability from cuts she makes in their backs).

The head of the Behavior studies campus of the College is Prof. Hanan Frenk, a vivisector that has been experimenting on animals for over 30 years. In the past Frenk built an animal experiments lab in Tel-Aviv University where he performed cruel experiments on animals to study pain. The laboratory was named "Pain Lab" by animal rights campaigners. In 1991 animal liberation activists (ALF) broke in to his lab, caused great economical damage and exposed the awful experiments.

Half a million animals are killed each year in laboratories in Israel after life of suffering. Animals are living creatures, sensitive to pain and are entitled to live their life free from torture and suffering.