New Video Exposes Laboratory Horrors-Without the Blood and Guts

PETA Will Use Chilling New Campaign to Urge NIH to Stop Funding Experiments on Animals

For Immediate Release:
October 24, 2018

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

A brand-new PETA video shows a little girl’s lost companion being picked up, caged, and taken to a laboratory in order to be strapped down, shaved, injected with chemicals, cut open, killed, and thrown away like trash—but unlike many of PETA’s videos, this one is 100 percent free of graphic footage of real animals.

PETA aims to use the new campaign, created by iconic global advertising company VMLY&R, to push the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to redirect funding from experiments on animals—which numerous experts decry as wasteful and useless—into modern, non-animal research that will actually save human lives.

“More than 100 million animals are killed in U.S. laboratories every year after being infected with diseases, addicted to drugs, force-fed poisons, or tormented in other ways,” says PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Alka Chandna, Ph.D. “PETA is calling on NIH to stop squandering taxpayer dollars on cruel experiments in which millions of sensitive, intelligent animals are tortured and killed every year and that fail to advance human health.”

An estimated 47 percent of the grants awarded by NIH pay for animal experiments despite their inapplicability to human beings. NIH itself has reported that, of all drugs found to be safe and effective in animal tests, 95 percent are found to be either unsafe or ineffective in humans. And up to 89 percent of experiments on animals can’t be reproduced, so approximately $28 billion per year is spent on misleading tests.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—notes that some of the irrelevant “research” subsidized by NIH includes injecting monkeys with cocaine and watching as they experience painful drug withdrawal, puncturing the intestines of mice so that bacteria will leak into their abdominal cavities and cause septic shock, and purposely breeding dogs to develop crippling canine muscular dystrophy.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.