Defense Conference to Face Bleating PETA ‘Sheep’ Protesting Barbaric Decompression Experiments

For Immediate Release:
October 18, 2022

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

A flock of PETA supporters led by a giant “sheep” will descend on the 2022 Defense Conference, where U.S. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro will be speaking, to confront the U.S. Navy over its agonizing decompression illness and oxygen toxicity experiments on sheep and other animals, whose spinal cords are injured in simulated dives. PETA urges the Navy to use available animal-free, human-relevant methods instead.

When:    Thursday, October 20, 11:30 a.m.

Where:    Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel, 2800 S. Potomac Ave., Arlington

During one recent test, sheep were put in high-pressure chambers, exposed to the same conditions that a diver would experience at 257 feet below sea level, and left there for 31 minutes. The animals were then forced to painfully decompress, during which they endured severe decompression sickness characterized by crippling joint pains, bloating (treated by stomach puncture), and conditions that are often lethal, such as cardiovascular collapse and spinal cord injury (leading to distress or paralysis).

“It’s outrageous that the U.S. Navy is wasting taxpayer money squeezing gentle sheep to death in barbaric deep-dive tests that have no relevance to human health,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA is urging Del Toro to sink these unethical decompression tests on animals and instead pursue superior, human-relevant modeling and in vitro studies.”

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.