‘Owls’ to ‘Screech’ Against Cruel Experiments at Johns Hopkins

PETA Will Demand an End to Federally Funded Brain Experiments on Dozens of Owls in Basement Laboratory

For Immediate Release:
June 25, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Wearing owl masks and blasting audio recordings of screeching owls taken inside a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a group of PETA supporters will gather outside the office of Johns Hopkins experimenter Shreesh Mysore and call for an end to his abuse of owls.

When:    Wednesday, June 26, 12 noon

Where:    Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Ames Hall, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St. (at the intersection with E. 34th Street), Baltimore

Mysore cuts into barn owls’ skulls to expose their brains, screws and glues metal devices onto their heads, forces them into plastic tubes so cramped that they can’t move their wings, keeps them there for up to 16 hours, clamps their eyes open, and bombards them with sounds and lights. He pokes electrodes around in the brains of the fully conscious birds, mutilating their brain tissue so severely that they become “unusable” to him—at which point he kills them. He claims to be studying human attention deficit disorder (ADD), even though barn owls don’t suffer from the condition and have vastly different auditory and visual systems from those of humans.

“Cutting open barn owls’ heads won’t help humans with ADD,” says PETA neuroscientist and former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow Dr. Katherine Roe. “PETA is calling on Johns Hopkins to stop pouring money into cruel experiments that contribute nothing to treatments for humans.”

Mysore has received more than $1 million in funding from the university and $1.3 million from the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.