Drive-By Protesters to Take On Johns Hopkins’ Grisly Owl Experiments
On Graduation Day, PETA Will Demand an End to University Laboratory’s Torment of Barn Owls
For Immediate Release:
May 20, 2020
Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382
With their cars covered with signs proclaiming, “JHU: Stop Tormenting Owls,” a caravan of PETA protesters will circle the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) campus during the school’s virtual graduation on Thursday. They will stop at the on-campus residence of President Ronald Daniels before heading to the nearby home of notorious experimenter Shreesh Mysore, who conducts gruesome, wasteful, and deadly brain tests on barn owls.
When: Thursday, May 21, 10 a.m.
Where: The university’s entrance at the intersection of W. University Parkway and San Martin Drive, Baltimore
When: Thursday, May 21, approximately 10:10 a.m.
Where: Daniels’ on-campus residence, Baltimore
When: Thursday, May 21, approximately 11 a.m.
Where: Mysore’s home, Baltimore
In the tests, Mysore cuts into owls’ skulls, inserts electrodes into their brains, and restrains the birds in an “experimental rig” in which they’re unable to move their wings. He then records their brain activity while forcing them to watch dots on a TV monitor or exposing them to bursts of noise through earphones. Funded by JHU with more than $1 million, Mysore intends to use 50 to 60 barn owls in the current set of painful experiments—including six birds just for surgical practice for his staff.
“As JHU sends its class of 2020 into the world, intelligent and sensitive owls are caged in a barren, fluorescent-lit cinderblock laboratory, where their brains are cut open and damaged and they’ll be killed,” says PETA neuroscientist Dr. Katherine Roe. “PETA is demanding that these pointless and indefensible experiments end now.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.
