PETA to Show Video of Monkey-Lab Horrors at Neuroscience Conference

For Immediate Release:
November 11, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

On Monday, as animal experimenters meet at the Society for Neuroscience’s (SFN) annual conference, a PETA mobile billboard will be outside the event showing video footage from inside laboratories that use monkeys. The video display will circle the San Diego Convention Center, located at 111 W. Harbor Dr., between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Among the experimenters who are members of SFN and expected to be at the conference are Margaret Livingstone, who takes newborn monkeys from their mothers and has sewn their eyelids shut; Shreesh Mysore, who cuts into owls’ skulls, inserts electrodes into their brains, and forces them to stare at computer screens while he blasts loud sounds into their ears; Elisabeth Murray, who brain-damages monkeys and then frightens them with fake spiders and snakes; and Elizabeth Buffalo, who straps thirsty monkeys into restraint chairs for hours at a time and forces them to perform memory tasks in exchange for a sip of juice.

“These experimenters make their living by tormenting animals,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “They won’t show video of the atrocities they commit to the public—so PETA will.”

Some of the video footage (here, here and here) that will be screened was taken inside Murray’s laboratory at the National Institutes of Health and shows a monkey named Beamish used in the fright experiments. PETA will also show disturbing footage from the Washington National Primate Research Center, where monkeys are imprisoned inside barren, kitchen cabinet–size cages and exhibit the devastating effects of long-term confinement and social isolation.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.