Provocative Exhibit to Expose Violent History of Animal Experiments, Including at Emory University

For Immediate Release:
May 9, 2022

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

As part of a national tour, PETA is erecting a large exhibit titled “Without Consent” that explores the troubled history of experiments on nonconsenting animals and challenges institutions—including Emory University and the affiliated Yerkes National Primate Research Center—to rethink this exploitative, expensive, cruel, and archaic idea of science. On display for five days, 24 panels will bear concise descriptions and photographs of nearly 200 animal experiments conducted at U.S. institutions from the 1920s through today. An interactive virtual exhibit is also available here.

When:    Wednesday, May 11, 12 noon

Where:    Emory Village, at the intersection of N. Decatur Road and Oxford Road N.E., Atlanta

“‘Without Consent’ tells the true stories of animals harmed and killed in experiments that they did not and could not consent to,” says PETA Vice President Dr. Alka Chandna. “Humans are only one animal species among many, and having the power to exploit the others does not give us the right to do so.”

The 110 million animals killed every year in U.S. laboratories are individuals who experience pain and fear—yet they’re burned, force-fed chemicals, sickened with disease, and robbed of their babies. In recent experiments, Yerkes experimenters tore infant monkeys away from their mothers to cause extreme psychological distress and later dosed them with cocaine, cut lesions in their brains, and caused them to have strokes.

Other Yerkes experiments involved bleeding monkeys and 10-week-old baby pigs every week, cutting out the animals’ kidneys, and surgically implanting the kidneys of the baby pigs into the monkeys, who then had to undergo repeated biopsies and forced drug dosing. After subjecting the baby monkeys to repeated bleeding and invasive biopsies, experimenters killed them and cut out their spleens, brains, and lymph nodes. In another experiment, experimenters took 16 2-week-old infant monkeys away from their mothers and then infected them with a virus that attacks their immune system.

Because 95% of all new drugs that test safe and effective in animal studies go on to fail or cause harm in human clinical trials, PETA is calling on the National Institutes of Health—which gave Emory more than $479 million in taxpayer funds in 2021—to phase out the use of animals in experiments and adopt the group’s Research Modernization Deal.

“Without Consent” uses a historical perspective to point out that beginning in medieval times, experiments were conducted on vulnerable humans—including orphans in tuberculosis and psychological experiments, immigrant women in gynecological surgeries, soldiers in LSD and poison gas tests, and impoverished Black men in syphilis experiments. The exhibit illustrates that just as society now understands that these experiments were wrong, we need to let that moral awakening guide our conduct today and to extend consideration to other nonconsenting beings who suffer and die in experiments—from floor-cleaner product tests to mother-infant separation studies.

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.