‘Giant Rat’ to Lead Protest at University of Delaware Board of Trustees Meeting
PETA Will Urge School to End ‘Child Abuse’ Tests on Rats
For Immediate Release:
May 13, 2019
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Led by a “giant, mutilated rat,” a group of PETA supporters will descend on the University of Delaware’s semiannual Board of Trustees meeting on Tuesday to call for an end to experimenter Tania Roth’s cruel “child abuse” studies on rats.
When: Tuesday, May 14, 3 p.m.
Where: University of Delaware Tower at STAR, 100 Discovery Blvd. (at the intersection with S. College Avenue), Newark
Since 2000, Roth has spent nearly $2 million in public funds injecting baby rats with opioids and forcing alcohol down their throats, stuffing pregnant rats into tiny restraint tubes and blasting them with strobe lights, repeatedly shocking infant rats’ feet, and dropping rats into tanks of water from which they can’t escape—all ostensibly to replicate early childhood abuse and trauma in humans. She’s taken newborn rats away from their mothers and given them to stressed females who, unequipped to care for the babies, have stepped on, dropped, dragged, and ignored them. She has also restrained rats in a Plexiglas enclosure smeared with cat food and placed it in a tiny metal cage with an adult cat so that the rats would become terrified that they’d be killed. Her findings haven’t been reproduced and have contradicted each other.
“Tania Roth’s tests traumatize vulnerable animals and fail abused children,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on the University of Delaware to end these irrelevant, curiosity-driven experiments now.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
