A Teddy Bear Takes on Seattle’s Cruel Animal Experiments in Eye-Opening PETA Ad
TV Spot Airing Tonight Shows the Gruesome Reality of Experiments on Animals—in a Nongraphic Way
For Immediate Release:
December 3, 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 Seattle residents who tune into the The Good Doctor 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.
PETA placed its ad in Seattle because the University of Washington (UW) is home to one of seven National Primate Research Centers, large primate laboratories funded by the federal government that use and kill hundreds of monkeys each. Official records reveal that in 2017, UW used 667 monkeys in experiments and an additional 565 for breeding purposes. UW has a history of committing serious violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act stretching back years. Earlier this year, a monkey was strangled to death on a chain in his cage. Last year, another died of thirst after suffering for days in his cage because no one noticed that his watering device wasn’t working. The university was fined $11,000 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture after one monkey starved to death, three others died following surgery on their skulls, and three young monkeys died when they were inappropriately caged with older ones.
“Seattle 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 misguided—is illegal.”
In addition to the 667 monkeys, records reveal that UW used 47 dogs, 172 cats, 311 rabbits, 174 pigs, and countless mice and rats in invasive and deadly experiments in 2017.
PETA’s new ad is part of its campaign demanding 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.
