A Teddy Bear Takes on Madison’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:
November 27, 2018

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 Wisconsinites who tune into the This Is Us finale tonight 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.

“Wisconsinites 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.”

PETA placed its ad in Madison because the city is considered by many to be the animal-experimentation capital of the United States. It’s home to enormous laboratories operated by Covance and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, including the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center and the Harry Harlow Primate Psychology Laboratory. At least 50,000 dogs and 75,000 monkeys—as well as countless mice, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and other animals—have been used in experiments in Madison in the past 10 years. Many of these animals have endured multiple experimental procedures and profound environmental and social deprivation in barren laboratory cages. Almost none have made it out alive.

PETA’s new ad is part of its campaign to demand that the National Institutes of Health stop awarding an estimated $15 billion for experiments on animals, which are killing not only animals but also 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.