Owl-Masked PETA Protesters to Hold a ‘Screech-In’ Against Johns Hopkins’ Owl Torture Experiments
For Immediate Release:
January 22, 2021
Contact:
Amanda Tumbleson 202-483-7382
On the first day of spring semester classes at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), a parliament of PETA protesters wearing owl masks will come in for a (socially distant) landing on campus to protest university experimenter Shreesh Mysore’s appallingly cruel, admittedly worthless, and apparently illegal brain experiments on barn owls. PETA has also placed an eye-catching ad in this week’s edition of The Washington Times calling on the National Eye Institute to stop funding the tests.
When: Monday, January 25, 12 noon
Where: JHU, at the intersection of E. 34th and N. Charles streets, Baltimore
In his experiments, Mysore surgically attaches bolts to owls’ skulls, inserts electrodes into their brains, and restrains the birds in an “experimental rig” in which they’re unable to move even one wing, while forcing them to watch dots on a TV monitor or exposing them to bursts of noise through earphones. Funded by JHU and taxpayers with more than $2.5 million, Mysore will use 50 to 60 barn owls in the current set of painful experiments—including six birds mutilated for surgical practice by his staff. All the owls will be killed after the tests, which do not advance human health.
“Students deserve to know that their school torments owls in a barren, fluorescent-lit cinderblock laboratory by cutting open and damaging their brains,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “More than 107,000 people have written to JHU calling for an end to these deadly experiments on owls, and PETA is urging a shift to superior, non-animal research.”
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.
