Chilling Virtual Reality Experience From peta2 Promises Close Encounters at Kent State

For Immediate Release:
October 7, 2024

Contact:
Brandi Pharris 202-483-7382

To encourage empathy for animals suffering in university laboratories, peta2—part of PETA’s youth division—will be visiting Kent State University Tuesday through Thursday with Abduction, an award-winning virtual reality experience landing on college campuses across the country.

In this eerie experience, visitors will enter a mysterious truck containing a mobile virtual reality studio. The students will find themselves seemingly stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, where they will be abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a shocking experience similar to that endured by animals in laboratories. They’ll watch as their friends are subjected to painful tests—knowing they’ll be next.

When:      Tuesday, October 8; Wednesday, October 9; and Thursday, October 10, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

Where:    Kent State University, next to the Kent Student Center (near the intersection of Summit Street and Risman Drive)

Watch the trailer here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request.

At Kent State, experimenters decapitated rats and dissected their muscles after exposing them to “predator odors” to cause stress. In a similar test, experimenters injected mice with various drugs, exposed them to stress-inducing odors, and shocked them with electricity to force them to walk on a treadmill. In another laboratory at the university, experimenters put 8-week-old mice in chambers and shocked their feet in “fear” and “stress” tests. The mice were then put into a beaker of water and subjected to a five-minute forced swim test, in which experimenters made them swim for fear of drowning.

“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are psychologically tormented, mutilated, and killed in laboratories, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says peta2 Vice President Rachelle Owen. “peta2 is on a mission to open young people’s eyes to this cruelty, help students understand what it feels like, and motivate them to join our call for a switch to superior, non-animal research.”

Studies show that 90% of all basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans, which is why peta2 is pushing universities to pivot to sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.

Since its debut, Abduction has visited more than 50 college campuses from coast to coast, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California–Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Austin. Abduction was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the immersive content creation studio Prosper XR, won Gold and Audience honors at the 2023 Shorty Impact Awards, and was a nominee for the 2024 Webby Awards.

peta2—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers young people positive, empowering actions to help animals. For more information, please visit peta2.com or follow the group on TikTok or Instagram.