TODAY (Video): Local PETA Supporters Disrupt UMass Faculty Event
For Immediate Release:
August 31, 2022
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Earlier today, PETA supporters disrupted the University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) faculty orientation at Hotel UMass, where they interrupted Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy’s speech in order to expose the school’s horrific menopause experiments on marmoset monkeys. Video footage of the happening is available here.
The protesters 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. In a crude mimic of hot flashes in the marmosets—who cannot experience menopause—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.
“New UMass faculty should know that their colleagues torment tiny monkeys behind closed doors,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “The university knows these experiments are meaningless garbage and should shut down this laboratory now.”
The protest is the first of several planned PETA back-to-school events to inform new students and faculty about the horrific experiments. PETA and its supporters also plan to hand out leaflets, hang up posters, protest, and circulate a mobile billboard to expose the laboratory.
PETA has been contacted by numerous UMass alumni and donors concerned about the school’s animal welfare violations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the university 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.
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