One Experimenter’s Story: I Hurt Animals

If you’ve ever seen footage of experiments on animals, you’ve probably asked yourself, “How do the experimenters sleep at night?”

In a recent New York Times column, Paul Gazda, a visual artist and present-day advocate for animal rights, details the years he spent participating in experiments that involved shocking pigeons and depriving mice of water. After 20 years, Gazda details the “awakening” he had while listening to a speech given by social activist John Robbins.

“That powerful talk made me realize that animals, like us, are sentient beings who have intelligence and experience fear and pain. I became a vegetarian. I also started thinking about what I had done to those animals in the labs,” he writes. 

Today, Gazda’s past experiences influence his art. One of his works—in which he turns the tables on the humans who experiment on animals—repurposes his actual white lab coat and is simply entitled, “We Are Sorry.”