Johns Hopkins Experimenter Scrambles Barn Owls’ Brains—Help Stop Him

Update: March 17, 2020 

PETA has fired off a letter to Johns Hopkins University (JHU) today and released damning reports and photographs obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that reveal the extent to which animals imprisoned in the university’s laboratories suffer as a result of negligence, incompetence, and a stunning disregard for their lives.

JHU’s violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act include locking highly social monkeys in solitary, barren cages with no enrichment as well as a number of horrific deaths endured by animals imprisoned at the school. In one instance, a worker closed a cage door on a marmoset monkey, killing the animal. In another, a monkey was found dead with her head stuck inside a ball used for “enrichment.” 

What’s more, in light of its campus shutdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, JHU has ordered its experimenters to identify “critical animals to be maintained,” presumably leading to the mass killing of countless others who aren’t considered “critical”—which begs the question Why were these animals forced to endure cruel and painful tests in the first place?

Now more than ever, it’s imperative that Shreesh Mysore’s laboratory be shut down so that the owls imprisoned in it can be sent to a sanctuary. Please take action below to help.

Originally posted on June 26, 2019:

Wearing owl masks and blasting audio recordings of screeching owls taken inside a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a group of PETA supporters gathered outside the office of Johns Hopkins experimenter Shreesh Mysore and called for an end to his abuse of owls.

Mysore cuts into barn owls’ skulls to expose their brains, screws and glues metal devices to their heads, forces them into plastic tubes so cramped that they can’t even move their wings, keeps them there for up to 12 hours, clamps their eyes open, and bombards them with sounds and lights. He pokes electrodes around in the brains of fully conscious birds, mutilating their brain tissue so severely that the animals become “unusable” to him—at which point he kills them.

He claims to be studying human attention deficit disorder (ADD), even though barn owls don’t suffer from the condition and their auditory and visual systems differ vastly from those of humans.

“Cutting open barn owls’ heads won’t help humans with ADD,” says PETA neuroscientist and former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow Dr. Katherine Roe. “PETA is calling on Johns Hopkins to stop pouring money into cruel experiments that contribute nothing to treatments for humans.”

Mysore has received more than $1 million in funding from the university and $1.3 million from the National Institutes of Health. Let’s get these gruesome experiments ended today.