TODAY (Video): Local PETA Supporters Storm UMass Alumni Event
For Immediate Release:
June 22, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Earlier this evening, PETA supporters crashed a University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) alumni gathering at Sunset Terrace at Chelsea Piers, where they confronted Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy to expose the school’s horrific menopause experiments on marmosets. Photos and video footage of the happening are available here.
Led by protesters with firsthand knowledge of menopause—a condition that marmosets don’t experience—the troop shouted out information about the tests, including that university experimenters zip-tie frightened marmosets into restraining devices, drill into their skulls, cut open their necks to expose muscle, and thread electrode leads from the scalp and neck to the abdomen. To mimic hot flashes in them, experimenters cut out their ovaries and heat the animals with hand warmers, like those placed in mittens. In these and other tests, sensitive and social monkeys are kept in solitary confinement—like Anakin, a marmoset who was eventually killed by UMass experimenters.
“UMass alumni should know that their alma mater is tormenting tiny monkeys behind closed doors,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “The university knows these experiments are meaningless garbage and should shut down this laboratory now.”
PETA has been contacted by numerous UMass alumni and donors concerned about the school’s animal welfare violations. The university has been cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for severely burning an animal on a heating pad as he was recovering from surgery, failing to alert an attending veterinarian to sick animals, and permitting a monkey to escape and injuring the animal’s tail during recapture.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
