PETA ‘Owls’ in Cages to Crash JHU Graduation

For Immediate Release:
May 20, 2022

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

PETA supporters, led by an “owl” mascot in a cage, will make some mayhem right outside the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) graduation ceremony this weekend. Urging administrators to shut down the school’s crude brain-mangling experiments on barn owls, the resolute group will rattle bars and crowd the protest area with stuffed owls in cages.

When:    Sunday, May 22, 5:30 p.m.

Where:    Homewood Field, 111 W. University Pkwy. (at the intersection with Canterbury Road), Baltimore

JHU experimenter Shreesh Mysore cuts open owls’ skulls, inserts electrodes into their brains, and bombards them with lights and noise for up to 12 hours at a time, purportedly to study attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in humans. When the owls’ brains become too damaged for additional experiments, he kills them. Mysore has publicly admitted that he may “misinterpret” what’s happening in the brains of the birds whose heads he bolts into place, and he received an official warning letter from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources for failing to obtain mandatory permits for his experiments on owls from 2015 to 2018.

“As Johns Hopkins University graduates plan for their futures, owls remain brain-damaged in Mysore’s laboratory,” says PETA Vice President Shalin Gala. “Nearly half a million concerned people have joined PETA in calling on Johns Hopkins to end these worthless experiments, and it’s time to free the owls.”

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.

For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.