VIDEO: Local PETA Supporters Confront UMass Officials at Alumni Event
For Immediate Release:
January 19, 2023
Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382
Earlier this evening, PETA supporters were kicked out by security at the Westin St. Francis hotel after invading the University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) alumni event and confronting President Marty Meehan and Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy over the school’s horrific menopause experiments on marmoset monkeys. Video footage is available here.
Joined by protesters with firsthand knowledge of menopause—a condition that marmosets don’t experience—an activist took the mic from President Meehan and informed alumni that UMass experimenters drill into marmosets’ skulls, cut open their necks to expose muscle, and thread electrode leads from the scalp and neck to the abdomen. To mimic hot flashes in them, experimenters cut out their ovaries and heat the animals’ bodies with hand warmers, like those placed in mittens. In these and other tests, sensitive and social monkeys are kept in solitary confinement—like Anakin, a marmoset who was eventually killed by UMass experimenters. The tests have cost taxpayers over $4 million.
“Alumni were horrified that UMass torments tiny monkeys behind closed doors,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is calling on the school to shut down these costly experiments that have never helped women and never will.”
PETA has been contacted by numerous UMass alumni and donors concerned about the school’s animal welfare violations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture cited the university for severely burning a marmoset with hand warmers as he was recovering from surgery, failing to alert an attending veterinarian to sick animals, and permitting a monkey to escape and then injuring the animal’s tail during recapture.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
