‘Isle of Dogs’-Style Video Highlights Texas A&M’s Own Island of Lab Cruelty

PETA’s New Stop-Motion Video Calls for End to School’s Muscular Dystrophy Experiments on Dogs

For Immediate Release:
March 26, 2018

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

As Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new film Isle of Dogs hits theaters nationwide, PETA has released its own video using stop-motion animation to tell the story of a dog in desperate need of rescue. PETA’s new video short, available here, depicts a dog in Texas A&M University’s (TAMU) laboratory, where dogs are purposely bred to develop crippling canine muscular dystrophy (MD) and then experimented on.

As the Anderson-style narrator explains, dogs at TAMU are caged inside a barren laboratory. Their swollen tongues and weakened jaw muscles make it difficult for them to swallow and breathe, and ropes of saliva hang from their mouths. For the dog featured in the story, “there is no grand adventure, no ragtag group of dog friends to rescue her, no happy ending,” the narrator says. “For her, there is only loneliness and suffering.”

The video cuts to real-life footage of TAMU’s laboratory—and it concludes, “It’s time to end cruel muscular dystrophy experiments on dogs.”

“Thirty-seven years of experiments that cause dogs to suffer have failed to produce a cure or even a treatment to reverse symptoms of muscular dystrophy in humans,” says PETA’s Dr. Alka Chandna. “PETA is calling for these cruel experiments to end and all surviving dogs to be released from this ‘trash island’ of a laboratory.”

PETA’s efforts to end these tests have received support from patients afflicted with MD, scientists—who have criticized the experiments’ inapplicability to human patients—and public figures, including Lily Tomlin, Miami Dolphins quarterback and TAMU alumnus Ryan Tannehill, and commentator Bill Maher, who called the university “dogs’ worst enemy.”

Previous PETA protests at TAMU can be viewed here. For more information, please visit PETA.org.