PETA Names Cruelest Animal Experimenters of 2020

For Immediate Release:
December 18, 2020

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Animal experimentation is a secretive, violent, abysmally cruel industry, and as 2020 comes to a close, PETA is dragging the perpetrators of the most appalling experiments on animals out of the shadows and giving them their due with a spot on its list of the Seven Worst Vivisectors of the Year:

• Donald C. Bolser (University of Florida) studies coughing. Among other horrors, he cuts open cats’ heads and puts dozens of electrodes in their brains, cuts open their backs to expose the spine in order to fix it to a device so that the cats can’t move, cuts open their chests to implant electrodes into the muscles involved in coughing, cuts open their throats to place electrodes in the muscles of the larynx, and puts chili pepper on their larynxes.
• Elizabeth Buffalo (University of Washington’s Washington National Primate Research Center) destroys monkeys’ brains to cause memory loss and deprives them of food and water so that they’ll watch a computer screen for up to nine hours in exchange for a few drops of juice.
• Shreesh Mysore (Johns Hopkins University) imprisons barn owls in a laboratory, cuts open their skulls, implants electrodes into their brains, restrains them in an “experimental rig” for up to 12 hours, clamps their eyes open, and bombards them with sounds and lights before killing and dissecting them.
• Elisabeth Murray (National Institutes of Health) is the evildoer behind “monkey fright” experiments, in which she inflicts permanent brain damage in monkeys and then confines them to darkened cages where they’re terrorized with realistic-looking rubber snakes and spiders.
• Ned Kalin (University of Wisconsin’s Wisconsin National Primate Research Center) put his own spin on Murray’s experiments and terrorized monkeys with live snakes after burning or suctioning out part of their brains.
• Michael Platt (University of Pennsylvania, formerly Duke University) implanted electrodes into monkeys’ brains, strapped them in a restraint chair for hours, and deprived them of water in order to force them to learn a computer game—all for a pointless study that supposedly reveals something about the human brain during decision-making. As if.
• Barbara Shukitt-Hale (U.S. Department of Agriculture and Tufts University) fed rats and mice berries and mushrooms, made them cognitively impaired by irradiating them, forced them to swim and try to balance on rotating rods, and beheaded and dissected them.

“Not one of these twisted tormenters has advanced human health, yet they’ve wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and put animals through a living hell,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “The empathy missing from these seven brains should alarm everyone, and PETA is committed to shutting down this junk science in 2021.”

Numerous published studies have shown that animal experimentation wastes resources and lives, as more than 90% of basic science research—most of which involves animal experimentation—fails to lead to treatments for humans. And 95% of new medications that are found to be effective in animals fail in human clinical trials.

PETA opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence toward other animals. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram or click here.