Bill Maher’s PETA Video Running in Sacramento for ‘World Week for Animals in Laboratories’

TV Host’s New Rule? Stop Wasting Taxpayer Money on Useless Animal Tests

For Immediate Release:
April 20, 2021

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

As Americans are filing their taxes, Bill Maher stars in a new PETA video that slams the government for doing one thing that we can all agree needs to stop: wasting our taxpayer money—in this case, on animal experiments, which the National Institutes of Health funded with approximately $18 billion of it last year alone. The spot is running on social media and conservative websites in Sacramento and Davis—where the California National Primate Research Center is based—during World Week for Animals in Laboratories (April 19–25).

“Experiments on animals are not only cruel, they don’t work,” Maher says in his video titled “New Rule: Listen to PETA.” He explains, “Ninety-five percent of new medications that work when tested on animals fail in humans. Ninety-five percent. A drug tested on a mouse has about as much chance of making it to the market as ‘Joe Exotic’ has of seeing his mullet come back in fashion.”

He goes on to describe just a few cruel and pointless “junk science” animal tests, including ones in which experimenters cut open cats’ skulls and deafened them and tore baby monkeys away from their mothers to torment them with fake snakes. “These are the sort of things that if a child did them, you’d know they were going to grow up to be a serial killer!” he notes. “And the National Institutes of Health that funds these experiments? More like National Institutes of Hell.”

In hellish laboratories across the U.S. each year, tens of millions of animals are poisoned, burned, cut into, emotionally traumatized, and infected with diseases while they suffer from extreme stress and frustration. No experiment is prohibited by law—no matter how painful or irrelevant—and almost all animals used in tests are later killed.

Maher ends with a plea for everyone to embrace high-tech, human-relevant, non-animal research. “Ending experiments on animals isn’t rocket science,” he says. “It’s just good science.”

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.