New PETA Virtual Reality Experience Promises Close Encounters at Yale University
For Immediate Release:
October 21, 2022
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
In a bid to encourage empathy for animals who are mutilated and killed in university laboratories, on Monday PETA will have its Yale University launch of Abduction, a unique virtual reality experience that will land on college campuses across the country. In the 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 are subjected to experiments—inspired by real tests done on animals—knowing that they’ll be next.
When: October 24–28, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Where: At the intersection of York Street and Alexander Walk, near Yale Law School, New Haven
Watch the trailer here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction virtual reality experience is available upon request. Images from the first day of the Yale Abduction stop will be available tomorrow.
At Yale, experimenters subject infant monkeys to “early life adversity”—including permanently removing babies from their mothers—to then study how it affects the animals’ behavior and social ranking. Other experimenters subject monkeys to brain surgeries in which they carve out a portion of the skull to implant instrumentation so that they can hold the monkeys’ heads stock-still for tests. Then they inject neurotoxins into the monkeys’ brains to inflict permanent and devastating brain damage.
“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 part of 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 Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
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.
