New PETA Virtual Reality Experience Promises Close Encounters at Princeton University

For Immediate Release:
October 19, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

In a bid to encourage empathy for animals who are mutilated and killed in university laboratories, tomorrow PETA will have its Princeton launch of Abduction, a unique virtual reality experience landing on college campuses across the country. 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 fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a terrifying experience similar to what animals endure in laboratories. They’ll watch as others undergo experiments inspired by real tests conducted on animals, knowing that they’ll be next.

When:    Thursday and Friday, October 20 and 21, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Where:    Princeton University, 33 Prospect Ave. (outside The Ivy Club), Princeton

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

At Princeton, experimenters cut into the heads of sensitive and intelligent monkeys, carved out a portion of their skulls, implanted a recording chamber, inserted electrodes into their brains, and forced the monkeys (who were deliberately kept thirsty) to respond to images on a screen in exchange for a sip of juice. In another study, experimenters separated baby mice from their mothers, subjected them to anxiety-inducing behavioral tests, and then killed them and dissected their brains.

“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, help them 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 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 several other college campuses from coast to coast, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request.

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