PETA ‘Owls’ to Ruffle Feathers at Johns Hopkins Orientation

For Immediate Release:
August 24, 2021

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

In time for orientation week at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), a flock of owl-masked PETA supporters with electrodes and wires protruding from their heads will make a scene at the campus this Thursday, in a push to stop JHU experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s crude brain-mangling experiments on barn owls. In the tests, Mysore implants electrodes in owls’ brains, clamps their eyes open, forces them to stare at dots, and bombards them with visual and auditory stimuli for up to 12 hours at a time. When they’re no longer of use, he kills them.

When:    Thursday, August 26, 12 noon

Where:    JHU, at the intersection of E. Gate and N. Charles streets, Baltimore

“While the school’s freshmen get oriented, Johns Hopkins disorients sensitive owls with electrical signals and other horrors in painful, deadly experiments,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “Students have every right to know what really happens on campus, and PETA welcomes them in the effort to promote modern and humane research.”

A Pew Research Center poll found that the majority of U.S. adults oppose the use of animals in scientific research, and other surveys suggest that the shrinking group that accepts animal experimentation does so only because it believes it to be necessary for medical progress. However, studies show that a staggering 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to treatments for humans.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

Please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.