Iggy Pop Donates ‘Free’ to PETA to Help End Cruel Monkey Experiments
New Video Set to Track by ‘Godfather of Punk’ Shows Distraught Monkeys Suffering in Stark Laboratory Cages
For Immediate Release:
September 14, 2020
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
“Anyone can see the pain and terror in these monkeys’ eyes. No one should have to suffer like this,” says Iggy Pop, who has just donated his song “Free” to PETA for a new video shining a spotlight on the suffering of monkeys subjected to mental and physical torment in laboratories.
The new video features footage from PETA’s investigations into National Institutes of Health (NIH) experimenter Elisabeth Murray’s painful, invasive, and deadly “monkey fright” tests, in which she inflicts permanent and traumatic brain damage in monkeys and then terrorizes them with fake snakes and spiders.
University of Massachusetts–Amherst experimenter Melinda Novak’s solitary confinement experiments and NIH experimenter Stephen Suomi’s maternal deprivation experiments, in which distraught monkeys were driven insane inside small, barren cages and baby monkeys were torn away from their mothers, respectively, are also featured in the video, as are tests by notorious multibillion-dollar “laboratory-for-hire” Covance.
Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of highly promising results from basic scientific research—much of it involving animal testing—fail to lead to treatments for humans. And 95% of new medications that are found to be safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.
Iggy Pop joins a long list of musicians—including Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Paul McCartney, The Black Keys, Sia, Morrissey, and Chrissie Hynde—who have donated their songs to PETA. 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.
