1,000 Members of Attention Disorder Community Demand That Johns Hopkins Stop Mutilating Owls

For Immediate Release:
November 2, 2023

Contact:
Kendall Davis 202-483-7382

Today, more than 1,000 PETA supporters diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other attention-deficit disorders called on Johns Hopkins University experimenter Shreesh Mysore to stop drilling into barn owls’ skulls and mutilating their brains. This petition is part of a new multimedia campaign launched by PETA.

The supporters all signed the petition that was sent with a letter today to university officials. They’re also calling for the reimbursement of the more than $3.7 million in taxpayer money that Mysore has received from the National Eye Institute for these experiments, almost $2 million of which he collected during the seven years he illegally experimented on and killed owls without mandatory Maryland state permits.

PETA’s campaign also includes an eye-catching full-page ad in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter exposing Mysore’s deadly and irrelevant tests on owls and a new video posted today on the group’s social media channels featuring supporters with ADHD demanding, “Talk to me. Stop torturing owls.” The video is narrated by Dr. Elena Tillman, a clinical psychologist who has ADHD.

PETA’s full-page ad featuring this petition, signed by more than 1,000 supporters who have attention disorders, appears in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter today.

“Cutting open owls’ heads and poking around in their brains to study human ADHD is as cruel as it is pointless,” says PETA Vice President of International Laboratory Methods Shalin Gala. “PETA is calling on Johns Hopkins to shut down Mysore’s lab now and switch to modern, animal-free research methods that are actually relevant to humans.”

In his experiments, Mysore cuts into barn owls’ skulls, implants electrodes in their brains, forces them into plastic tubes or jackets so cramped that they can’t move their wings, clamps their eyes open, and bombards them with sounds and lights for up to 12 hours. When he’s done with them, he kills them.

Modern, sophisticated neuroimaging techniques that don’t use animals—including functional MRI, positron emission tomography, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and electroencephalography—have already led to major advancements in understanding attention-deficit disorders.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.