A Teddy Bear Takes on Johns Hopkins’ Cruel Experiments in Eye-Opening PETA Ad
New TV Spot Shows the Gruesome Reality of Experiments on Animals—in a Nongraphic Way
For Immediate Release:
November 13, 2018
Contact:
Brooke Rossi 202-483-7382
The abuse that’s inflicted on animals in laboratories such as those at Johns Hopkins University is too violent for broadcast television—and too disturbing for many people to watch. But Baltimore viewers of This Is Us will get a glimpse of just how cruel it is, thanks to a new PETA ad campaign that is kicking off tonight.
The nongraphic ad by top creative agency VMLY&R depicts a teddy bear being taken to a laboratory, where he’s strapped down, injected with chemicals, cut open, killed, and thrown away—just as happens to real animals every day in laboratories in Baltimore and across the country.
“Baltimore residents deserve to know what’s happening to animals in their own community 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 useless—is illegal.”
Johns Hopkins University receives more funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) than any other university in the country—much of which is wasted on cruel, curiosity-based experiments that are irrelevant to human health. To cite just one example, Johns Hopkins experimenter Shreesh Mysore—who received more than $800,000 in tax-funded grants from NIH—cuts into barn owls’ skulls, inserts electrodes into their brains, restrains the birds in an “experimental rig,” and blasts them with noises from earphones.
PETA’s new ad is part of its campaign to demand that NIH stop awarding an estimated $15 billion each year to experiments on animals, which are killing animals as well as 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.
PETA’s motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on.” For more information, please visit PETA.org.
