‘Owls’ to Protest Brain Experiments at Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins Students and PETA Will Demand an End to Painful and Pointless Tests on Birds in Basement Laboratory

For Immediate Release:
December 5, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Wearing owl masks, student group CARE, along with concerned community members and PETA supporters, will descend on Johns Hopkins University on Friday to call for an end to university experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s brain experiments on owls.

When:    Friday, December 6, 12 noon

Where:    Johns Hopkins University, at the intersection of E. 34th and N. Charles streets, Baltimore

Mysore has received more than $1 million in funding from the school and $1.3 million from the National Institutes of Health. He cuts into barn owls’ skulls, exposes their brains, screws metal devices to their heads, restrains them in tight jackets, clamps their eyes open, and bombards them with sounds and lights. He pokes electrodes around in conscious birds’ brains, mutilates their brain tissue, and kills them. He claims to be studying human attention deficit disorder (ADD), even though barn owls don’t suffer from the condition and have vastly different auditory and visual systems from those of humans.

“Tormenting and killing owls does nothing to help humans with ADD,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “PETA is calling on Johns Hopkins to shut this grotesque laboratory down before one more bird pointlessly suffers and dies at this experimenter’s hands.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.