A Teddy Bear is the ‘Test Subject’ in PETA’s Eye-Opening Ad Aimed at North Carolinians

New TV Spot Shows the Gruesome Reality of Experiments on Animals—in a Nongraphic Way

For Immediate Release:
November 12, 2018

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

The abuses that are inflicted on animals in experiments are too violent for broadcast television—and too disturbing for many people to watch—but North Carolinians who watch The Big Bang Theory will get a glimpse of what happens to them inside laboratories, thanks to a clever new PETA ad created by top creative agency VMLY&R.

The nongraphic ad depicts a teddy bear being taken to a laboratory, where he’s strapped down, injected with chemicals, cut open, killed, and thrown away—which is exactly what happens to real living, breathing, feeling animals every day in several laboratories in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

“North Carolinians deserve to know what’s happening to animals in their own communities under the guise of ‘science,’” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “If animals were burned, poisoned, crippled, or blinded outside of a laboratory, it would warrant cruelty-to-animals charges, yet no experiment—no matter how painful or useless—is illegal.”

Research Triangle Park is the largest research park in the United States. It’s home to 12 federally registered animal laboratories, which subjected nearly 10,000 dogs, cats, monkeys, guinea pigs, rabbits, sheep, pigs, and horses to painful, invasive experiments last year alone. At Duke University, one of the schools in that region, monkeys are being used in taxpayer-funded brain experiments in which metal coils are stitched onto their eyes, holes are drilled into their heads, and electrodes are inserted into their brains. It’s estimated that 200,000 rats, mice, and birds were also used in other area laboratories, but their numbers aren’t included in official tallies.

PETA’s new ad is part of its campaign to demand that the National Institutes of Health stop awarding an estimated $15 billion to experiments on animals, which are killing not only animals but also humans who die while waiting for treatments or cures. Ninety percent of animal studies fail to lead to treatments for humans, and 95 percent of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human trials.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.