Please see the following statement from PETA Foundation General Counsel for Animal Law Jared Goodman regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the appeal of North Carolina and the Farm Bureau of the lower court’s February ruling that the state’s “ag-gag” law is unconstitutional.
“Ag-gag” laws are a desperate, last-ditch attempt by animal exploiters to smother free speech and hide appalling cruelty to animals from a public that is increasingly disinclined to tolerate it. PETA is celebrating today’s decision and will continue to use every legal means at its disposal, including whistleblower reports and undercover investigations, to expose the horrors that occur behind closed doors in laboratories, on factory farms, in slaughterhouses, in puppy mills, and at other abusive facilities.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information about PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.
Without a doubt, there are no good laboratories for the animals imprisoned in them. Learn which university facilities are mutilating owls, sewing baby monkeys’ eyes shut, cutting into pigs, and more—then take action to help shut down this senseless cruelty.
1. Harvard University
Newborn baby monkeys at Harvard University are torn from their loving mothers’ arms. Some of these infants have their eyes sewn shut, while others are raised by experimenters wearing welding masks. In both cases, the terrified animals don’t see any human or monkey faces for an entire year, damaging their development. This is the work of Harvard experimenter Margaret Livingstone, who conducts these depraved sensory-deprivation experiments to tell us what we already know: Being confined to total darkness is damaging.
In cruel experiments that have no relevance to human health, baby monkeys in Livingstone’s laboratory are torn away from their mothers and raised in emotionally impoverished conditions, without the possibility of seeing any faces—human or monkey—for a full year.
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) is hooked on animal abuse, and it’s time for a serious intervention. University experimenters have given prairie voles the equivalent of 15 bottles of wine a day, and they’ve subjected monkeys to a plethora of abuse within the school’s primate research center. If that weren’t enough, PETA recently discovered that university doctors-in-training mutilate live pigs by using them as human stand-ins during obstetrics and gynecology residency training. They cut into live female pigs, dissect their organs, perform invasive surgeries on them, and then kill any survivors. OHSU apparently isn’t aware that humans and pigs have very different anatomies.
Tiny marmoset monkeys don’t experience menopause, yet experimenter Agnès Lacreuse at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst still zip-ties them into restraining devices, shoves them into plastic cylinders, and implants electrodes in their skulls in attempts to study age-related changes in human cognition. She removes the monkeys’ ovaries and uses hand warmers—yes, hard warmers—on these animals to mimic hot flashes. It’s no wonder that these experiments haven’t amounted to anything useful. The laboratory is only accomplished in doing two things without fail: killing delicate monkeys and racking up animal welfare violations.
Birds “born” on the bayou may end up dead in a laboratory, thanks to Louisiana State University experimenter Christine Lattin. Fond of kidnapping and terrorizing wild birds, she conducts experiments that have included feeding crude oil to birds and starving sparrows. In her latest tests, she injects chemicals into sparrows’ heads to damage their brains. She then exposes them to various objects, such as cocktail umbrellas and pipe cleaners, to frighten them and record their reactions. After this torment, she kills them and chops up their brains.
Newborn baby monkeys were torn from the arms of their panic-stricken mothers. Frustrated monkeys mutilated themselves compulsively and plucked themselves bald. Stressed animals were forced to live together in small cages, resulting in fights and injuries. Babies were starved, and their limbs were broken. Animals were killed due to staff negligence. This is a snapshot of life before experimentation for the thousands of monkeys trapped within the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Wisconsin National Primate Research Center. If they survive these grisly conditions, they will then endure an array of painful procedures. As just one example, experimenters restrain monkeys and electroshock their penises until they ejaculate.
Cut from the same soiled cloth, the Washington National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington (UW) is yet another ghastly monkey prison with a long history of animal welfare violations. Monkeys have been strangled to death, died of thirst, been mauled by other stressed monkeys, and choked to death on their vomit. To add insult to injury, the center also has a facility dedicated to experimenting on baby monkeys. UW’s other laboratories are also rife with issues, having let animals starve, suffocate, and slowly bake to death under a heat lamp.
Johns Hopkins University experimenter Shreesh Mysore cuts into the skulls of barn owls, screws metal devices onto their heads, inserts electrodes into their brains, forces them to look at screens for hours a day, and bombards them with noises and lights. In some experiments, he restrains fully conscious owls for up to 12 hours in cramped plastic tubes that prevent them from moving. In the end, he kills them. Since owls are nothing like humans, these abominable experiments do nothing to further the understanding of human disorders.
This owl is one of many imprisoned in Shreesh Mysore’s laboratory, where he cuts into their skulls and screws metal devices onto their heads in curiosity-driven experiments that have no relevance for human health.
In a cruel Utah State University psychology course, rats are imprisoned inside barren metal boxes and blasted with random bursts of bright light while being trained to push a lever to receive food pellets. Although the course had previously used an effective and humane “online rat simulator,” the university made the backward decision to torment animals instead.
Simpson College in Iowa also imprisons rats inside tiny boxes. In a psychology course, students attempt to train them to push a lever to receive a drop of flavored water. After the course ends, the rats who don’t get adopted are killed.
“None of us really like talking about that too much,” Don Evans, Simpson’s chair of psychology, said publicly.
Yeah, don’t worry, we’ll do that for you. We’ll keep talking about this until the university ditches this cruel curriculum and switches to effective, non-animal methods.
10. Lackeys bankrolled by the U.S. Navy: Duke University, University of California–San Diego, University of Maryland–Baltimore, and University of South Florida
The U.S. Navy pays these four universities to do its dirty work and conduct sickening decompression experiments on animals. In tests at the University of California–San Diego and Duke University, experimenters force rats and mice to run on a treadmill and electroshock them if they can’t keep up. Experimenters also lock them inside pressure chambers and induce seizures in baby mice. At the University of Maryland–Baltimore, experimenters lock mice in decompression chambers, probe their rectums, drill into their skulls, and inject chemicals into their brains and eyes. At the University of South Florida, experimenters cut open rats and run wires through their bodies, induce seizures in them, and drill into their skulls. In the end, experimenters at all four universities kill the animals—sometimes by bleeding or gassing them to death.
This doomed animal in a hyperbaric chamber is one of the countless rats who University of South Florida experimenter Jay Dean has used to supposedly study oxygen toxicity in humans, even though human-relevant, animal-free methods are widely available.
PETA’s Research Modernization Deal is a comprehensive plan to phase out all animal experimentation in favor of modern, human-relevant methods. Please voice your support today.
PETA helps as many animals as we can when we’re able to race to the site of a natural disaster or the scene of human-made destruction. We do everything we can to rescue, treat, and comfort them and restore their peace of mind.
For example, PETA Germany and its partners have been on the ground in Ukraine since the country was invaded. Their determination and grit have helped thousands of animals reunite with their families after they were separated by deadly shelling. Rescuers in the field continue to go back to known, dangerous areas to help the dogs, cats, horses, and others left behind who are suffering from severe emotional distress, dehydration, starvation, and infected wounds. The animals didn’t start the war, and fieldworkers on the ground are determined to help as many as they can survive it by placing their own safety on the line to deliver food and provide on-the-ground veterinary care before transporting as many animals as possible to safer areas.
Teams supported by PETA’s Global Compassion Fund were there to navigate the murky waters of flooded streets to save frightened animals clinging to rooftops or struggling to reach a patch of dry ground after the destruction of a major dam in southern Ukraine, too.
When war broke out in Lebanon between Hezbollah paramilitary forces and the Israeli military, PETA Asia representatives went to the war zone to help dogs, cats, and other animals who were abandoned after government officials ordered the citizens to evacuate.
When Taal Volcano in the Philippines violently erupted, sending a massive plume of smoke and lava 9 miles into the air, PETA Asia was there within 48 hours of the first eruption. The team was dashing across Taal Lake in a boat loaded with hundreds of pounds of food and fresh water to help the dogs, cats, pigs, goats, horses, chickens, ducks, and other animals who were stranded as the rumbling volcano threatened to erupt again.
It took the entire staff and a dedicated group of volunteers working around the clock—soon in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic—but hundreds of animals were saved. Many were reunited with their guardians, and more than 100 others found refuge at PETA Asia’s partner veterinary clinic. Here, they received baths, treatment for their injuries, vaccinations, spay/neuter surgeries, leash training, exercise, socialization, and love.
We’ve been on the ground after many a hurricane and tornado. For instance, when those in Hurricane Katrina’s path were told they were forbidden from bringing their animal companions on the ferry boats to safety, thousands of animal companions were left behind. As guardians desperately fled their homes, PETA volunteers were rushing to the scene of the fifth-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history to enter boarded-up houses, scour flooded neighborhoods, and save as many abandoned animals as they could.
After a whopping 31 inches of rain fell in parts of Louisiana in less than three days, causing half a dozen rivers to overflow their banks and flooding 40,000 homes in 30 parishes, PETA sent a team of emergency responders to Baton Rouge to assist with efforts to locate and rescue stranded animals. Due in part to PETA, more than 1,000 animals were rescued from the deluge of water.
Donate to the Global Compassion Fund
Animals don’t belong to religions or have nationalities, and they own no bombs or tanks—yet they suffer in our wars. When animals are forced to suffer from human-induced violence or natural disasters, PETA entities do as much as we possibly can to help them survive the devastation.
To help fund this vital work, donate to PETA’s Global Compassion Fund. Your gift will support rescuers and provide care for animals in need.
Below, please see a statement from PETA Vice President Lisa Lange in response to Offset’s gift of bags made of crocodiles’ skins to Cardi B for her birthday:
Instead of using his wealth and influence for good, Offset chose to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into a gruesome, violent industry that electroshocks crocodiles, shoves metal rods into their heads in an attempt to scramble their brains, and mutilates them while they’re still alive. PETA reminds everyone that people who still spend their money on a closet full of dead animals’ body parts either are clueless or simply don’t care about the extreme cruelty they’re perpetuating—it’s just not worth it.
A PETA Asia investigation shows that slaughterhouses that supply luxury fashion brands electroshock crocodiles and shove metal rods into their heads in an attempt to scramble their brains, and nails are driven into snakes’ heads while they’re still conscious. Forward-thinking brands—including Chanel, Stella McCartney, Victoria Beckham, Burberry, HUGO BOSS, Vivienne Westwood, and Calvin Klein—have dropped reptile skins from their products.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org, listen to The PETA Podcast, or follow the group on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram.
