A Teddy Bear Takes on Boston’s Cruel Animal Experiments in Eye-Opening PETA Ad

New TV Spot Shows the Gruesome Reality of Experiments on Animals—in a Nongraphic Way

For Immediate Release:
April 8, 2019

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

The abuse that’s inflicted on animals in experiments is too violent for broadcast television—and too disturbing for many people to watch—but Boston residents who tune into ABC NewsCenter 5 at 6 p.m. today, Wednesday, and Friday will get a glimpse of the horrors that animals endure inside laboratories, thanks to a new PETA ad from top creative agency VMLY&R.

The nongraphic ad shows a teddy bear being taken to a laboratory, where he’s strapped down, injected with chemicals, cut open, killed, and thrown away—which is exactly what happens to tens of millions of real living, breathing, feeling beings every day in laboratories across the nation.

“Boston residents deserve to know what’s happening to animals in their own communities under the guise of ‘science,’” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “If animals were burned, poisoned, crippled, or blinded outside a laboratory, it would warrant cruelty-to-animals charges, yet no experiment—no matter how painful or misguided—is illegal.”

Often called “biotech’s biggest hub,” Greater Boston is an epicenter for the animal experimentation industry, as dozens of laboratories and companies that supply animals, cages, and other equipment are based in the region. In one crude ongoing experiment studying the effects of cannabinoids at McLean Hospital, squirrel monkeys were restrained in plexiglass chairs and an electrode was placed on their tail that delivers electric shocks to them once every weekday.

PETA’s ad has also appeared on TV stations near other major facilities that use animals in cruel and worthless experiments in Maryland, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin. Boston is included in a PETA ad blitz that also targets Seattle, New Orleans, and Davis, California, to persuade the National Institutes of Health to stop awarding an estimated $15 billion each year for experiments on animals, which are killing both animals and the humans who die while waiting for treatments or cures. Ninety percent of animal studies fail to lead to treatments for humans, and 95 percent of new drugs that test safe and effective in animals fail in human trials.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.