Kevin Nealon Rails Against Animal Tests in New PETA Video

Amid COVID-19 Pandemic, Man With a Plan Star Demands a Plan for Real Research—Not Wasteful Experiments on Animals

For Immediate Release:
April 24, 2020

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

“True or false? Animal testing still happens,” begins Kevin Nealon in a new PETA video released on World Day for Animals in Laboratories. “You’re probably thinking, ‘Oh, it’s that archaic pseudo-science thing we used to do. Thank God that’s gone.’ And you’re half right—it is pseudo-science. But it’s still happening today!”

The Saturday Night Live alum is taking aim at the resources that are wasted on animal experiments, which have never led to a treatment or a cure for a pandemic. As he explains in the video, nine out of 10 new drugs that work in animals fail in humans—but more than $18 billion in taxpayer money goes to support experiments on animals every year. While the National Institutes of Health has spent more than $36 million to terrorize baby monkeys with rubber snakes in fright experiments, doctors don’t have enough ventilators and personal protective equipment during a deadly pandemic.

Across the U.S., millions of animals are locked inside barren laboratory cages, poisoned, burned, cut into, emotionally traumatized, and infected with diseases while they suffer from extreme frustration and loneliness. No experiment is prohibited by law—no matter how painful or irrelevant—and almost all animals used in tests are later killed.

“There’s been so much wasted time and so many wasted lives—the animals who died in experiments that meant nothing and the people who died waiting for a cure that wasn’t found because of bad science,” says Nealon. “Let’s pay for REAL research and REAL science—now. We can’t afford to wait.”

Nealon is part of a long list of comedians and other celebrities—including Amy Sedaris, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, Molly Shannon, Bill Maher, and many others—who’ve teamed up with PETA to promote kindness to animals.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.