Video: PETA’s Rendition of Iconic ‘Operation’ Game Has a Twist
For Immediate Release:
March 23, 2022
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
PETA is releasing the reality show of board games with Vivisection, a twist on the classic Hasbro game Operation. As seen in this new video, the satirical game features a monkey on the operating table, rather than the usual chubby man, and a gloved player in a lab coat removes items such as “taxpayer dollars” and “useless data.” The game playing is interspersed with actual footage of monkeys used in laboratory experiments.
“‘Vivisection’ is a game—but PETA is not playing around here,” says PETA Senior Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. “The reality of animal experimentation is grim for hundreds of thousands of monkeys imprisoned in laboratories, whose daily torment wrecks their bodies and slowly melts their minds.”
Every year, the National Institutes of Health wastes nearly half its annual budget on animal experiments (or $19 billion in 2020), even though 95% of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials. PETA’s new video features footage from the laboratory of Elisabeth Murray at the National Institute of Mental Health, who permanently damages monkeys’ brains and then terrifies them with fake spiders and snakes in experiments that have wasted $50 million in taxpayer funds over four decades but haven’t yielded any treatments or cures for mental health conditions in human patients.
The video concludes by encouraging viewers to visit PETA.org/NPRC to join PETA’s campaign to shut down the seven federally funded national primate research centers (NPRCs), where baby monkeys are yanked away from their mothers and where caged monkeys spin in circles, pull out their own hair, bite themselves, and engage in other behavior indicative of distress and trauma.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
