Bob Barker to Congress: Stop Baby-Monkey Experiments
As Congress deliberates the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) budget bill for next year, every member will soon receive a video message from Bob Barker. In a new video for PETA, the television icon calls for an end to NIH’s hugely expensive, much-criticized, insupportable and deeply cruel maternal-deprivation experiments on infant monkeys.
“At this government facility in Maryland, hundreds of baby monkeys are torn from their mothers,” Bob explains in the video, which reveals how experimenters subject baby monkeys to years of scary and painful tests designed to cause, worsen, and measure their severe fear, depression, and anxiety. These experiments have never led to the development of treatments for human mental illness, but they’ve continued for more than 30 years, costing taxpayers more than $30 million in just the past seven years alone.
“This project is approved to continue until 2017, but it needs to stop right now,” Bob concludes in the video. “Please be a champion for animals, taxpayers, and public health by acting now to help end the NIH’s abusive and wasteful experiments on baby monkeys.”
Bob’s video is the latest salvo in PETA’s campaign to stop NIH’s cruel experiments. In December, compassionate members of Congress called on NIH to conduct a thorough scientific and ethical review of the cruel experiments. In January, U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard and Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell co-hosted PETA’s standing-room-only congressional briefing on the cruelty of the experiments, their inapplicability to human health, and the superior non-animal research methods available to study mental illness. PETA has also enlisted the support of scientists such as Dr. Jane Goodall, celebrity psychotherapist Dr. Jenn Berman, conservative strategist Mary Matalin, members of Congress, and hundreds of thousands of citizens.
Please share Bob Barker’s video with your friends and family and urge your members of Congress to take action to end the funding of these costly, irrelevant, and inhumane experiments.
