From Brain Mutilation Experiments on Owls to Muscular Dystrophy Tests on Dogs, Group Reveals the Tax Dollars Propping Up Laboratory Suffering
For Immediate Release:
February 15, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Baltimore – “The buck stops here.” PETA has just launched a free augmented reality (AR) tool that pulls back the curtain on the cold, hard taxpayer cash that funds the government’s cruel and wasteful animal experiments. Users can scan real dollar bills with their phones, prompting an AR version of the greenback to appear on their screen along with an animated animal and damning information about experiments.
PETA’s “owl” mascot will be debuting the project on the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) campus this week, offering passersby a $1 bill to try out the AR tool on it with their phones.
When: Thursday, February 17, 12 noon
Where: Keyser Quad, JHU, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore
The experiments exposed include the following.
- For the $1 bill: In Johns Hopkins University JHU experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s brain studies on barn owls, he cuts into the birds’ skulls, inserts electrodes into their brains, forces them to look at screens for hours a day, and bombards them with noises and lights—to the tune of more than $1.9 million from taxpayers.
- For the $5 bill: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave Texas A&M University $5 million to breed golden retrievers to have canine muscular dystrophy, causing the dogs’ muscles to deteriorate as they languished in barren cages.
- For the $10 bill: Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars go to support the country’s seven national primate research centers, where monkeys inside cages barely larger than their bodies spin in circles, pull out their own fur, and bite themselves in frustration.
- For the $20 bill: NIH spends nearly $20 billion on animal experiments each year, even though 95% of new medications found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.
- For the $50 bill: Nearly $50 million has been funneled into NIH experimenter Elisabeth Murray’s “monkey fright” tests, in which parts of monkeys’ brains are destroyed before the animals are placed alone in small metal cages and deliberately frightened by fake snakes and spiders.
“Many people don’t know that their hard-earned tax dollars are enabling twisted animal experimenters who have pseudo-science agendas and hearts of coal,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “As U.S. global dominance in science wanes, PETA is pressing for the adoption of its Research Modernization Deal, which outlines a plan to stop the waste of tax money on cruel animal experiments and instead inject funds into superior, human-relevant research methods.”
PETA’s free augmented reality tool is available at PETA.org/AR.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on the group’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
