PETA’s Response to Neuralink Video of Monkey Appearing to Play Video Game

For Immediate Release:
April 9, 2021

Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382

Please see PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo’s statement on the video released by Elon Musk’s Neuralink of a monkey with a chip implanted in his brain manipulating a video screen in exchange for liquid:

The monkey wasn’t fooled by the jungle photo screen, and no one else should be, either. Monkeys in neuroscience experiments are kept constantly thirsty or hungry to coerce them to cooperate and stare at a screen for hours, and when the session is over, they go back into a cage. Experiments similar to Neuralink’s have been done many times before, always at the expense of animals whose lives have been stolen, and nothing has come of it. Neuralink would break real scientific ground if its research left animals out and actually helped humans.

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.