PETA Now Crowdsourcing Innovative Ideas to Protect Animals

Wanted: Inventors and Investors Who Want to Be Animal Game-Changers

For Immediate Release:
September 11, 2013

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Norfolk, Va. — PETA, widely known for its theatrics and celebrity supporters, has taken on a new challenge: crowdsourcing innovative ideas and inventions to help millions of animals who are in dire straits and need rescuing. The group wants to encourage game-changing ideas such as bio-printed, replacement human body parts that spare animals in laboratories, jacket and sleeping bag insulation made from 99 percent air instead of from live-plucked goose down, and augmented-reality mobile apps that develop the users’ empathy and respect for animals by simulating an animal’s (e.g., a rat, pigeon, cat, etc.) perspective of humans in urban environments. PETA already has an outstanding reward of $1 million to the first person to produce marketable laboratory-grown chicken meat, a science project that is already coming to fruition.  

“Digital Frog, a computer program that replaces dissection, would once have seemed impossible, but now it’s saving frogs’ lives in many a classroom,” says PETA Director Justin Goodman. “Science—and the funding to sustain it—has played a role in nearly every human advancement, and we are now harnessing that ingenuity to help animals.”

Those responding to the call for innovation will be connected to PETA’s project development team, which will work with innovators to refine the most promising ideas. For people wanting to build their investment portfolio with sustainable and legacy-making financial choices, the PETA development team will pair investors with innovative projects. 

PETA’s first success with cutting-edge solutions for animals came in 1993 when the group pushed the automobile industry worldwide to stop using live pigs and baboons in car crash tests and switch to human-relevant crash-test dummies. In March, PETA supported the development of a 3-D human skin-cell model that will prevent tens of thousands of rabbits every year from having caustic chemicals smeared onto their bare skin.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.