VIDEO: Get the F-Out! Animal Defenders Met with Profanity at UMass Event in Florida
For Immediate Release:
February 4, 2025
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
a group of PETA supporters challenged University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass) leadership at an event at Seagate Golf Club, urging the school to end experimenter Agnès Lacreuse’s cruel and pointless tests on tiny marmosets.
Animal defenders peacefully held their signs reading, “UMass: Stop Torturing Marmosets!” and attendees quickly turned aggressive. They shouted profanities, ripped activists’ signs away, and shoved them toward the exit. Photos and videos are available here.
“While UMass officials putter around at swanky golf clubs, tiny marmosets are being mutilated, tormented, and killed in Lacreuse’s cruel and scientifically pointless experiments,” says PETA Chief Scientist Dr. Katherine Roe. “PETA calls on Chancellor Reyes to shut down this shameful laboratory and embrace modern, animal-free research that’s actually relevant to humans.”
In Lacreuse’s laboratory, experimenters screw electrodes onto marmosets’ skulls, cut into their necks, deprive them of water, zip-tie them, and shove them into plastic cylinders. Many of the tests are purportedly studying menopause, which marmosets don’t naturally experience. Lacreuse has squandered more than $6 million in taxpayer funds on these curiosity-driven tests.
PETA recently urged federal officials to investigate whether Lacreuse misused taxpayer money after she spent approximately $340,000 on a failed sleep deprivation experiment at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center.
In nature, marmosets live high up in the canopies of rainforests in tight-knit social groups composed of up to three generations of family members.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
