New PETA Virtual Reality Experience ‘Abduction’ Promises Close Encounters on College Campuses

For Immediate Release:
October 17, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In a bid to encourage empathy for animals who are mutilated and killed in university laboratories, PETA is launching Abduction, a unique virtual reality experience soon landing on college campuses across the country—many of which house laboratories where animals are imprisoned and tormented. In this eerie experience, visitors will enter a mysterious truck and put on a virtual reality headset. They’ll seemingly find themselves stranded in the desert with a couple of their fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and put through a terrifying experience similar to what animals endure in laboratories: They’ll watch as their friends are subjected to experiments—inspired by real tests done on animals—knowing that they’ll be next. Watch the trailer here.

Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request. The Abduction tour includes the following stops:

• George Washington University (Washington, D.C.), where experimenters drilled holes in the skulls of baby mice in order to inject tumor-causing cells into their brains
• Princeton University (Princeton, New Jersey), where experimenters cut incisions in the heads of sensitive and intelligent monkeys, carved out a portion of their skulls, implanted a recording chamber, and inserted electrodes into their brains before forcing them to respond to images on a screen in exchange for a juice “reward”
• University of Massachusetts–Amherst (Amherst, Massachusetts), where experimenters drill holes in the skulls of monkeys, thread electrode leads through their abdomens, zip-tie them into restraining devices, and overheat them with hand warmers in order to simulate hot flashes associated with menopause—which they don’t even experience

“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are being tormented, mutilated, and killed in cold, barren laboratories, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says PETA Senior Director Rachelle Owen. “PETA is on a mission to open young people’s eyes to this cruelty 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 PETA is pushing universities to pivot to sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.

Abduction—which was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the virtual reality creation studio Prosper XR—will stop at college campuses from coast to coast, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on the group’s newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.