PETA’s Metro Ad Blitz Blasts NIH’s Cruel Experiments on Baby Monkeys

Hundreds of Ads Target Government-Funded Terrorizing of Infant Monkeys

For Immediate Release:
September 30, 2014

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA is taking its newly launched campaign against the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) much-criticized psychological experiments on infant monkeys (video included) straight to NIH’s doorstep. More than 250 new ads at NIH’s Medical Center Metro station stop and elsewhere confront commuters with photos of primate mothers and the infants who were torn away from them at birth and subjected to years of taxpayer-funded experiments designed to cause, worsen, and measure the babies’ severe fear, depression, and anxiety.

A banner at the Medical Center station—which also ran as a full-page color ad in The Washington Times—proclaims, “NIH: Millions Spent Scaring Baby Monkeys and Making Them Depressed, Lonely, and Drunk Since 1983. Stop It Now.” Train car ads throughout the Red Line read, “First They Take Your Freedom. Then They Take Your Babies.” And in an effort to reach D.C. lawmakers, these ads will also run in the Union Station and Federal Triangle Metro stations. The ads, which enlist a cutting-edge technology that helped nab PETA a nomination for an award by the Mobile Marketing Association, invite commuters to text “NIH” to 73822, triggering an e-mail calling on NIH to end the experiments.

“The public deserves to know that its money is being squandered on terrorizing baby monkeys in cruel and pointless experiments,” says PETA Director of Laboratory Investigations Justin Goodman. “PETA’s Metro ads give tourists, commuters, and NIH employees an eyeful of what goes on behind closed laboratory doors as well as a simple way to take action to stop it.”

NIH’s experiments include breeding baby monkeys to be prone to mental illness and terrifying them with loud noises and threatening, masked human beings. As they age, some are subjected to chemically induced depression or forcibly addicted to alcohol, which worsens their symptoms. Approximately 200 monkeys are currently being used in these experiments, which have gone on for 30 years and received $30 million from tax funds in just the past seven years. Prominent scientists, including Dr. Jane Goodall, have joined PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—in opposing the experiments.

All Metro ads will run through the last week of October. For more information, please visit PETA.org/NIHChildAbuse.