Celebrities Watch Animal Testing Videos—Their Reactions Will Haunt You

“It feels like we’re living in a real-life horror film.” Experimenting on animals is a real-life horror. Watch as celebrities—including Theo Rossi, Emilio Rivera, Kate del Castillo, Patricia De León, and Elisabetta Canalis—see firsthand the gut-wrenching suffering these animals endure in laboratories.

Every year, more than 110 million animals—including mice, rats, frogs, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, fish, and birds—are killed in U.S. laboratories for biology lessons, medical training, curiosity-driven experimentation, and chemical, drug, and food testing. Researchers infect them with disease, force them to inhale toxic fumes, immobilize them in restraint devices for hours, drill holes into their skulls, burn their skin, and crush their spinal cords, among other horrors.

And as if this outrageous cruelty weren’t enough, animals in laboratories are confined to cages barely larger than their own bodies, socially isolated, and psychologically traumatized. Virtually everything they need and want in life is denied them.

“I just don’t understand when I see people in the videos doing it—I don’t understand how they sleep. I know we live in like a cruel world, but they just wanted to be loved—they just wanted someone to help them.”

—Theo Rossi

The only federal law that covers the use of animals in U.S. laboratories, the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), allows experimenters to burn, shock, poison, isolate, starve, and forcibly restrain them; addict them to drugs; and damage their brains. No experiment, no matter how painful or pointless, is prohibited—and painkillers are often not required. Even when animal-free testing methods are available, U.S. law doesn’t require that they be used—and they often aren’t. Because the AWA specifically excludes rats, mice, birds, amphibians, and reptiles, more than 95% of the animals used in laboratories aren’t even covered by its minimal protections.

“What are we gonna really learn from that? It doesn’t even translate over to whatever the fuck we are. You dig?”

—Emilio Rivera

Studies show that 90% of basic research, most of which involves animals, fails to lead to treatments for humans, and 95% of all new medications that test safe and effective in animals fail in human clinical trials. Yet every year, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) spends $20 billion—nearly half its annual budget—on animal experiments. PETA scientists’ Research Modernization Deal exposes the failure of animal experiments and provides a strategy for replacing them with superior, human-relevant methods.

It’s Time to Wake Up From This Nightmare

Each of us can help prevent animals from being tormented and killed in horrific tests by buying products made by cruelty-free companies, donating only to charities that don’t experiment on animals, requesting alternatives to animal dissection, and demanding the immediate implementation of humane, effective non-animal tests by government agencies and corporations.

Text MODERN to 73822 to urge members of Congress to mandate that NIH stop throwing away taxpayer money on cruel, useless animal experiments and instead focus on modern, non-animal research methods.

Not a U.S. resident? Take action for animals in laboratories below:

Message and data rates may apply. U.S. only. Text STOP to end and HELP for info. Full terms are available at http://peta.vg/txt.