‘Inside the Bunker’: 18-Month Investigation Exposes Cruelty, Confinement, and Corruption Inside a Spanish Laboratory
There’s no denying it: Laboratories that use and kill animals in useless tests are hell on Earth. A new documentary on Prime Video, Undercover: Inside the Bunker (Infiltrada en el Bunker), blows the lid off this chilling reality with real footage captured during one of the most extensive undercover operations ever conducted in an animal testing laboratory.
A Dangerous Mission Inside “The Bunker”
For 18 months, an undercover investigator known by the pseudonym Carlota Saorsa risked everything to capture the extreme suffering inside Vivotecnia—a contract testing laboratory in Madrid that she came to call “The Bunker.” While working at the big pharma-funded laboratory, Saorsa saw—and documented—beagles driven mad by severe confinement, a rabbit who was paralyzed and left to suffer for 48 hours before workers killed them to collect data, and a worker admitting that he falsified data. These are just a few of the egregious cruelties she witnessed while working at the facility.
Acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pablo de la Chica—who has twice won the prestigious Goya Award—interviewed Carlota and used her story to shape the narrative of the documentary. Due to the serious safety threats she faced after going public, Carlota was entered into a witness protection program, and an actor portrays her in the film. Her footage, on the other hand, is not reenacted—it’s real.
A Life-Changing Decision
Carlota Saorsa didn’t set out to be a whistleblower, but everything changed when she watched footage from the now-infamous “Britches investigation”—a 1985 landmark laboratory exposé at the University of California, Riverside, centered around a stump-tailed macaque named Britches. Experimenters at the facility tore Britches from his mother at birth, sewed his eyelids shut, and strapped a sonar device to his head as part of a cruel sensory-deprivation experiment. Advocates freed him—along with hundreds of other animals imprisoned in the hellhole—and released the footage to PETA to expose the cruelty to the world.
For Carlota, the footage was life-altering. She describes her world as divided into “before Britches” and “after Britches.” That moment lit a fire in her—a determination to do something for animals trapped in similar conditions. Years later, as a veterinary technician in Madrid, she applied for a job at Vivotecnia, not to be part of the system—but to expose it from within.
A Broken System
As disturbing as Undercover: Inside the Bunker is, it’s not a one-off horror story. The abuse Carlota documented at Vivotecnia is not the exception—it’s the rule.
Nearly every PETA investigation into animal testing laboratories has revealed the same things Carlota documented: neglect, confinement, painful and invasive surgeries, experimenters leaving animals to suffer and die in agony, mass slaughter, manipulated or falsified data, and rampant corruption. These investigations have spanned universities, government-funded labs, and private corporations across the globe. The details may differ, but the pattern is always the same: Laboratories use animals like disposable tools, not living, feeling beings.
All this suffering is for nothing: 95% of new drugs that appear safe and effective in animal tests fail in human clinical trials.
This failure rate isn’t surprising. Different species react to drugs in different ways. Dogs, monkeys, mice—they aren’t stand-ins for human bodies. Yet laboratories like Vivotecnia keep repeating the same cruel methods, despite their inaccuracy.
It’s time for the scientific community to evolve. Humane, human-relevant methods—like organ-on-a-chip technology, advanced computer models, and 3D cell cultures—are not just more compassionate, they’re more effective.
Watch Undercover: Inside the Bunker and Take Action!
This powerful documentary is free to stream on Prime Video with a subscription. Watch it now:
Other Ways to Take Action
If you live in the U.S., ask your lawmakers to introduce legislation implementing the principles of ’ ’PETA’s Research Modernization Now, which outlines a strategy for replacing cruel and wasteful experiments on animals with advanced, human-relevant methods.
Everyone can take action for animals suffering in laboratories. Join PETA in urging the dean of Colorado State University to reconsider allowing her faculty to conduct experiments at High Quality Research—a contract testing facility that our investigators exposed for neglect, painful mutilations, and more.
