A Teddy Bear Takes on California’s Cruel Animal Experiments in Eye-Opening PETA Ad

Creative TV Spot Airing Today Shows the Gruesome Reality of Experiments on Animals While Evading Broadcast Censors

For Immediate Release:
April 16, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

The abuse that’s inflicted on animals in experiments is too violent for broadcast television—and too disturbing for many people to watch—but San Francisco residents who tune into ABC7 News between 5 and 7 p.m. tonight (as well as Wednesday and Friday of this week) will catch a glimpse of the horrors that animals endure inside laboratories, thanks to a new PETA ad. In the ad, a teddy bear is a surrogate for the millions of animals used and killed in U.S. laboratories every year. The toy bear is taken to a laboratory, where it’s strapped down, injected with chemicals, cut open, killed, and discarded like trash.

PETA placed its ad in the Bay Area because the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF) uses thousands of animals in deadly experiments every year. UCSF is one of the recipients of the highest amount of funding for animal experiments from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The school also has a long history of violating federal animal-welfare laws and guidelines.

The University of California–Davis (UC-Davis) is also home to one of seven National Primate Research Centers, large flagship primate laboratories funded by the federal government. Official records reveal that in 2017, UC-Davis used 2,387 monkeys in experiments and an additional 2,293 primates for breeding and teaching purposes. Since 2013, the University of California system has been cited for at least 24 violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act—one of the worst track records in the nation—including for multiple incidents in which monkeys escaped from their enclosures and died from subsequent injuries as well as for failing to provide them with basic veterinary care. PETA has a pending California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking to compel UC-Davis to release video footage of the school’s taxpayer-funded experiments on young monkeys.

“San Francisco residents deserve to know what’s happening to animals in their own community under the guise of ‘science,’” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “If animals were burned, poisoned, crippled, or blinded outside a laboratory, it would warrant cruelty-to-animals charges, yet no experiment—no matter how painful or misguided—is illegal inside labs.”

Federal records reveal that UCSF used 1,661 voles, 1,239 rabbits, 259 gerbils, 48 pigs, 46 sheep, and 16 monkeys in 2017. It also used countless mice and rats in invasive and deadly experiments that year.

PETA’s ad has also appeared on TV stations near other major facilities that use animals in cruel and worthless experiments in Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin. The ad is part of PETA’s campaign to persuade NIH to stop awarding an estimated $15 billion each year for experiments on animals, which are killing both animals and the humans who die while waiting for treatments or cures. Ninety percent of animal studies fail to lead to treatments for humans, and 95 percent of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human trials.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview.

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