New Ad Blitz Takes Aim at Deadly Experiments on Owls at Johns Hopkins University
PETA Calls For End to Cruel and Wasteful Tests as the Fall Semester Begins
For Immediate Release:
August 31, 2020
Contact:
Amanda Tumbleson 202-483-7382
PETA is kicking off the fall semester at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) with a new ad placed on six bus shelters near campus calling for an end to the school’s gruesome and deadly brain experiments on barn owls. In addition, to reach students who are learning online this semester, PETA has placed the ad on the website of The Johns Hopkins News-Letter (the school’s student paper) as well as in The Baltimore Sun and on Facebook.
The ad details how experimenters cut into barn owls’ skulls, implant electrodes in their brains, lock them in restraining devices for many hours, and then bombard them with noises and lights to observe their reactions. The birds are eventually killed.
“Johns Hopkins University has shown time and again that it doesn’t give two hoots about owls abused for its junk science, and this needs to stop,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “PETA’s ad blitz exposes the millions of dollars and dozens of lives wasted by mutilating, tormenting, and killing owls in crude brain experiments that aren’t applicable to humans.”
Funded by the National Institutes of Health and JHU with more than $2.5 million, experimenter Shreesh Mysore intends to use 50 to 60 barn owls in his current set of painful experiments, including six birds just for surgical practice for his staff. Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of basic research—much of it involving animal experimentation—fails to lead to treatments for humans.
PETA’s ad appears on bus shelters at these intersections:
- Charles Street and University Parkway
- 33rd Street and Guilford Avenue
- Greenmount Avenue and Exeter Hall Avenue
- North Avenue and St. Paul Street
- York Road and E. Cold Spring Lane
- York Road and Winston Avenue
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.
