Giant ‘Rat’ to Protest Notorious Experimenter’s Boca Raton Presentation

PETA Will Call On University of Delaware Experimenter Tania Roth to Stop Tormenting Baby Rats in ‘Child Abuse Studies’

For Immediate Release:
June 28, 2018

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

What:    Led by a giant “rat,” PETA supporters will gather outside the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society annual meeting in Boca Raton on Friday in a spirited protest of panelist and University of Delaware experimenter Tania Roth’s cruel “child abuse studies” on baby rats.

When:    Friday, June 29, 12 noon

Where:    501 E. Camino Real (at the traffic circle on E. Camino Real and Boca Resort Drive), Boca Raton

Since 2000, Roth has spent nearly $2 million in public funds injecting baby rats with opioids and forcing alcohol down their throats, stuffing pregnant mothers into tiny restraint tubes and blasting them with strobe lights, repeatedly shocking infant rats’ feet, and dropping rats into tanks of water from which they can’t escape—all to replicate early childhood abuse and trauma in humans. She’s taken newborn rats away from their mothers and given them to stressed females who, unequipped to care for the babies, have stepped on, dropped, dragged, and ignored them. Roth has also restrained rats in a Plexiglas enclosure smeared with cat food and placed it in a tiny metal cage with an adult cat so that the rats would become terrified that they’d be killed. Her findings haven’t been reproduced and have contradicted each other.

“Tania Roth has spent nearly two decades and $2 million in taxpayer money tormenting rats in tests that are completely irrelevant to human children,” says Alka Chandna, Ph.D., PETA’s vice president of laboratory investigations cases. “Her job appears to involve thinking up new ways to create severe depression in rats. Her experiments do nothing to help humans and are like torture sessions for these intelligent and sensitive animals.”

For more information, please visit PETA.org/ChildAbuse.