Dead ‘Owls’ Will Haunt Johns Hopkins

For Immediate Release:
July 13, 2022

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) will be “closed for cruelty” on Thursday, according to the caution tape that PETA supporters will wrap around the university’s entrance, where an “owl” mascot will lie inside a chalk body outline. The “crime scene” is designed to call out JHU experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s deadly experiments on barn owls, for which he implants electrodes in owls’ brains, forces them to stare at dots, and bombards them with noises and lights for up to 12 hours at a time. When the owls are no longer of use to him, he kills them in an experiment that has cost taxpayers $1.9 million and counting.

When:      Thursday, July 14, 12 noon

Where:    Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St. (near 34^th Street), Baltimore

PETA has exposed how these experiments were conducted illegally, without mandatory state permits, for four years and further violated the state law against killing owls under the permit that Mysore then held for up to at least three years. But last month, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources issued Mysore a new permit that allows for the killing to continue.

“Johns Hopkins is a crime scene, where vulnerable owls are mutilated, tormented, and killed despite laws designed to protect them,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Katherine Roe. “PETA is calling on the National Institutes of Health to cut all funding for these horrific experiments on owls or be complicit in a blatant corruption of science and the law.”

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.