Teddy Bear TV Ad Rejected for Being Too ‘Tough for Viewing’—Seriously

PETA’s PSA Shows Experiments on a Toy Animal—but It’s Still Too Much for Yale’s Hometown ABC Station

For Immediate Release:
June 24, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA tried to place a TV public service announcement during The Bachelorette that uses a teddy bear to show what happens to animals in laboratories, such as those at Yale University—but even though the ad is completely nongraphic, WTNH News 8 (an ABC affiliate) in New Haven refused to air it, telling PETA that the “[c]ontent is a little tough for viewing.”

The ad, which recently won a prestigious Telly Award, depicts a teddy bear being taken to a laboratory, where he’s strapped down, injected with chemicals, cut open, and then thrown away—which is what happens to real animals in laboratories in New Haven and across the country. The ad previously aired on prime-time television in Baltimore; Madison, Wisconsin; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; and Seattle.

“If it’s ‘tough’ to see a teddy bear experimented on, imagine how the public would react to seeing what happens to real animals at Yale University and in other laboratories,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “Right now, experimenters at Yale are hurting thousands of monkeys, mice, pigs, and other animals—and they’re allowed to hide the abuse from the public, whose tax dollars fund most of it.”

In 2018, Yale imprisoned 159 monkeys, 470 hamsters, 104 pigs, 369 thirteen-lined ground squirrels, and countless mice and rats and used them in cruel experiments. More than 160 hamsters were used in experiments involving pain or distress for which adequate anesthetic, analgesic, or tranquilizing drugs were deliberately withheld. In 2017, PETA exposed Yale postdoctoral student Christine Lattin’s cruel studies in which songbirds were captured in the wild, deliberately tormented to produce severe stress, and then killed. Lattin is now at Louisiana State University.

Studies show that most animal studies fail to lead to treatments for humans and that 95% of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human trials.

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.