UMass Murderers!’ PETA Mobile Ad to Stake Out School Official’s Home
For Immediate Release:
August 27, 2021
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Tomorrow, University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy will wake up to a new PETA mobile billboard rolling through his neighborhood, which slams the school for caging, tormenting, and killing marmosets to study menopause—a condition that marmosets do not experience. In a push to end backward research at UMass, the billboard will also take to the streets of downtown Amherst to alert students, faculty, and others near campus.
Raking in nearly $4 million from taxpayers, UMass experimenter Agnès Lacreuse drills holes in the skulls of the small monkeys, threads electrode leads through their abdomens, zip-ties them into restraining devices, and overheats them with hand warmers purportedly to simulate menopausal hot flashes.
“These painful studies can’t tell us a thing about menopause, but UMass carries on knowing that marmosets’ cooperative and gentle nature is easy to exploit,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “PETA urges Chancellor Subbaswamy to use taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars on modern test methods, not bogus, cruel experiments.”
The group notes that animals also suffer because of the negligence of UMass experimenters and laboratory staff. Reports document violations of federal animal welfare guidelines: Mice have drowned, birds have starved to death, and zebrafish have died from overheating. In one incident, experimenters failed to give necessary pain relief to several hundred mice who had just undergone surgery.
A Pew Research Center poll found that the majority of U.S. adults oppose the use of animals in scientific research. And 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. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
