VIDEO: PETA Supporters Confront UMass President at Alumni Pre-Game Event

For Immediate Release:
December 12, 2022

Contact:
Amanda Hays 202-483-7382

A PETA supporter was thrown to the ground at a University of Massachusetts–Amherst (UMass) alumni pre-game reception earlier today at Heritage at Sportsman’s Park ahead of the Arizona Cardinals vs. New England Patriots game, after confronting UMass President Marty Meehan about the school’s horrific menopause experiments on marmosets.

Video footage is available here.

Animal defenders alerted alumni that UMass experimenters zip-tie frightened marmosets into restraining devices, drill into their skulls, cut open their necks to expose muscle, and thread electrode leads from the scalp and neck to the abdomen.

Experimenters cut out the ovaries of marmosets and heat the animals with hand warmers—the kind used in mittens—in a crude simulation of hot flashes. Marmosets don’t experience menopause. In these and other cruel tests, social monkeys are kept in solitary confinement—like Anakin, a marmoset who was used and eventually killed by UMass experimenters.

“UMass alumni need to know that their alma mater is tormenting defenseless monkeys in disgusting experiments,” says PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo. “PETA is urging UMass to shut down this seedy laboratory and shift to modern, animal-free research methods.”

PETA has been contacted by numerous UMass alumni and donors concerned about the school’s animal welfare violations. The university has been cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for severely burning an animal on a heating pad as he was recovering from surgery, failing to inform an attending veterinarian about sick animals, and permitting a monkey to escape, 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.