New PETA Virtual Reality Experience Promises Close Encounters at Texas A&M

For Immediate Release:
March 30, 2023

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

To encourage empathy for animals who are mutilated and killed in university laboratories, PETA will visit Texas A&M University on Friday to launch Abduction, a unique virtual reality experience landing on college campuses across the country. In the eerie experience, visitors will enter a mysterious truck and put on a virtual reality headset. They’ll seemingly find themselves stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a terrifying experience similar to what animals endure in laboratories. They’ll watch as others are subjected to experiments—inspired by real tests done on animals—knowing that they’ll be next.

When:    Friday, March 31, 1 p.m.

Where:    Rudder Plaza, 401 Joe Routt Blvd., College Station

Watch the trailer here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request.

At Texas A&M, experimenters pumped chemicals into mice for a month, causing them to have high blood pressure; fed them a high-salt diet and more drugs; then killed them by draining their bodies of blood. Other experimenters repeatedly injected chemicals into mice to induce brain damage, subjected them to behavioral tests for a year, then killed them, cut out their brains, and cut off their legs. In another study, experimenters injected drugs into rats’ arteries to induce strokes, subjected them to behavioral tests, repeatedly took their blood, and then killed any survivors. Other horrors at Texas A&M have included infecting guinea pigs with pneumonia-causing bacteria, injecting chemicals into mice to cause kidney damage, and performing canine muscular dystrophy experiments on dogs. The dog lab shut down following a PETA campaign, and more than 50 dogs were released for adoption.

“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are being tormented, mutilated, and killed in cold, barren laboratories, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says PETA Senior Director Rachelle Owen. “PETA is on a mission to open young people’s eyes to this cruelty, help them understand what it feels like, and motivate them to join our call for a switch to superior, non-animal research.”

Studies show that 90% of all basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans, which is why PETA is pushing universities to pivot to sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.

Abduction—which was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the virtual reality creation studio Prosper XR—has stopped at several other college campuses from coast to coast.

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, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.