A Teddy Bear Tackles the Trauma of Animal Tests in New Video

PETA’s Latest Ad Campaign Avoids ‘Graphic Content’ Filters—and Keeps Viewers Watching—by Putting a Teddy Bear in an Animal’s Place

For Immediate Release:
October 24, 2018

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

A little girl’s lost teddy is picked up, caged, and taken to a laboratory, where he’s strapped down, shaved, injected with chemicals, cut open, killed, and thrown away like a piece of trash—it’s a new PETA video, and, in order to ensure its playability through social media “graphic content” filters, top creative agency VMLY&R made the “test subject” a teddy bear.

“The real-life ordeals that dogs, monkeys, and rats suffer through when cut open, poisoned, or burned and then killed in experiments are too graphic for many to watch and impossible to get onto social media,” says PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Alka Chandna, Ph.D. “PETA’s new video allows the viewer to relate to the millions of animals who suffer in laboratories, even though there are superior, non-animal methods that could be used instead.”

PETA aims to use the new campaign to push the National Institutes of Health to stop awarding nearly half its grants for animal experiments, the results of which have been established to be inapplicable to human beings. Some of this irrelevant “research” includes injecting monkeys with cocaine, puncturing mice’s intestines, and purposely breeding dogs to develop crippling canine muscular dystrophy. Ninety percent of animal studies fail to lead to treatments for humans, and 95 percent of new drugs that test safe and effective in animal studies fail in human trials.

PETA has collaborated previously with VMLY&R, including on its headlines-grabbing “Meat Interrupts Your Sex Life” ad.

PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on.” For more information, please visit PETA.org.