PETA’s Virtual ‘Without Consent’ Exhibit Exposes a Century of Suffering

For Immediate Release:
April 6, 2021

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

PETA has launched a fully interactive online exhibit titled “Without Consent” that explores 100 years of suffering inflicted on nonconsenting animals in laboratories and seeks a change in business as usual. Visitors to “Without Consent” can scroll through the decades from 1920 to 2020 and learn how infant monkeys were taken from their mothers and raised alone in a “pit of despair” to induce devastating mental illness, cats were deafened and their spines were cut, and dogs were electroshocked so many times that they gave up trying to escape.

The exhibit first debuted as a three-dimensional, larger-than-life installation on Capitol Hill, complete with a statue of a dog and a rat that read, “Imagine having your body left to science while you’re still in it.” The physical version of the exhibit will continue to travel the U.S. in 2021, with plans for it to be displayed in city centers and at colleges and universities.

PETA will use the virtual timeline to encourage the new administration to rethink the National Institutes of Health’s allocation of taxpayer dollars to animal experimentation—an exploitative, expensive, painful, unreliable, and archaic idea of science.

As the timeline reveals, many cruel practices continue. Mice are force-fed experimental chemicals and made to inhale toxic chemicals at Charles River Laboratories, marmosets are used in invasive surgical procedures and repeatedly restrained at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, and baby monkeys are still torn away from their mothers.

“‘Without Consent’ tells the real-life stories of animals tormented and killed in painful experiments that they did not and could not consent to,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA says the time has come for the U.S. government to acknowledge that just as experimenting on nonconsenting humans (such as in the LSD studies on soldiers and tuberculin experiments on human orphans) was wrong, we must now stop tormenting animals in laboratories.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.