From ‘Lab Rats’ to ‘Lap Rats’: See These Three Sisters’ Journey (VIDEO)

For Immediate Release:
May 12, 2020

Contact:
Megan Wiltsie 202-483-7382

These three rescued rat sisters hit the jackpot. As a new PETA video released today shows, Peggy, Siri, and Sarah were born at the Cleveland Clinic, in the laboratory of Hod Dana, who performs grisly brain experiments on rats and mice—but a PETA eyewitness who worked there came to their rescue.

Now, the sisters are sleeping on soft bedding, snacking on fresh fruit and veggies, and building nests in a safe, comfortable home with a loving guardian who appreciates their beautiful personalities.

Their littermates weren’t so lucky. PETA’s painstaking investigation revealed that experimenters at the clinic insert “cranial windows” into mice’s skulls by cutting into their heads, suctioning out portions of their brains, and then fitting the animals with a glass coverslip over the brain and a stainless steel “head cap.”

“Rats are such intelligent, curious, unique individuals, and yet they’re commonly used as living test tubes—not for scientific reasons but because they are cheap and easy to handle,” says PETA Vice President Daniel Paden. “PETA encourages everyone who is moved by this video to join us in helping to end animal tests and getting tax dollars to go toward state-of-the-art, non-animal research methods instead.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. More information about the group’s campaign against the National Institutes of Health’s taxpayer-funded animal experiments is available here.