TODAY (Video): Local PETA Supporters Detained After Confronting UMass Experimenter
For Immediate Release:
November 16, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Earlier today, PETA supporters were detained by police and banned from campus after invading the University of Michigan’s (U-M) Pharmacology Seminar Series, where they confronted University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) experimenter Agnès Lacreuse, interrupting her seminar in order to expose UMass’ horrific menopause experiments on marmoset monkeys. Video footage is available here.
A protester took the mic, and activists shouted out information about the tests, including that Lacreuse drills into marmosets’ skulls, cuts open their necks to expose muscle, and threads electrode leads from the scalp and neck to the abdomen. To crudely mimic hot flashes in the small monkeys—who do not experience menopause—experimenters cut out their ovaries, administer hormone-manipulating drugs, and heat the animals with hand warmers like those placed in mittens. In these and other tests, sensitive and social monkeys are kept in solitary confinement—like Anakin, a marmoset who was eventually killed by UMass experimenters.
“U-M faculty and students should know that Lacreuse torments tiny monkeys in cruel and deadly menopause experiments that will not help women,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “In an age when superior, human-based research can so effectively study the effects of hormone fluctuations in humans, it defies ethics and logic to condemn vulnerable marmosets to lives of misery and distress.”
PETA has been contacted by numerous UMass alumni and donors concerned about the school’s animal welfare violations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the university for severely burning a marmoset with hand warmers as he was recovering from surgery, failing to alert an attending veterinarian to sick animals, and permitting a monkey to escape and then injuring the animal’s tail during recapture.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
