Johns Hopkins’ Ghoulish Owl Experiments Prompt Protests

Ahead of International Owl Awareness Day, PETA Will Demand an End to Federally Funded Brain Tests in Basement Laboratory

For Immediate Release:
July 31, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In advance of International Owl Awareness Day (August 4), PETA supporters will swoop in for a landing at a busy street corner near Johns Hopkins University on Thursday to call for an end to university experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s painful and pointless brain experiments on owls.

When:    Thursday, August 1, 12 noon

Where:    At the intersection of N. Charles and E. 33rd streets, Baltimore

Mysore cuts into barn owls’ skulls to expose their brains, screws and glues metal devices onto their heads, forces them into plastic tubes so cramped that they can’t move their wings, keeps them there for up to 16 hours, clamps their eyes open, and bombards them with sounds and lights. He pokes electrodes around in the brains of the fully conscious birds, mutilating their brain tissue so severely that they 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 have vastly different auditory and visual systems from those of humans.

“Causing owls this much pain and suffering is indefensible and won’t help humans with ADD,” says PETA neuroscientist and former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow Katherine Roe. “PETA is calling on Johns Hopkins to stop these shameful 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.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.