PETA Statement: Broken Elbows, Botched Head Surgeries at Johns Hopkins University

For Immediate Release:
October 7, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see the following statement from PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo regarding federal documents that reveal critical federal Animal Welfare Act violations at Johns Hopkins University:

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has added to its already lengthy history of horrific federal Animal Welfare Act violations. PETA recently obtained federal records showing broken elbows and botched head surgeries in the school’s animal laboratories, which are deadly indictments of an incompetent research system. PETA has already exposed JHU’s invasive brain experiments on owls—some of them done in violation of Maryland state law. Now, federal officials have cited JHU because a pig subjected to a heart experiment had to be killed and both his elbows were found to have been broken, supposedly as he moved from one area to another, and a staffer left the injured animal to suffer without letting veterinary personnel know. The university was also cited for failing to provide pigs with necessary pain relief and for using an unsterile technique when cutting into monkeys’ skulls, causing serious infections and failure of half the animals’ cranial implants inserted by an experimenter. These monkeys were also killed. If JHU can’t even manage basic veterinary care, it should not get one more penny of our tax dollars to harm and kill animals in laboratories. PETA is filing a complaint with the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare at the National Institutes of Health and demanding an investigation.

For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.