Experiments Conducted at Harvard and MIT Are Inexcusable, Group Says
For Immediate Release:
April 12, 2011
Contact:
Robbyn Brooks 202-483-7382
Boston — Using billboards, taxicabs, newspapers, bus shelters, and thousands of posters, PETA has embarked on the most aggressive ad campaign against animal experimentation in the organization's history, and Boston is the first stop. Why? Because more than $475 million dollars of public money went to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 alone, and millions more went to other Boston-based laboratories. The ads—which show actual animals suffering in laboratories where PETA conducted investigations and read, "If You Call It 'Medical Research,' You Can Get Away With Murder"—aim to show that animal experiments are cruel, wasteful, and archaic. PETA will place the ads in the vicinities of both schools and will expand to other cities in the coming months.
"Universities are raking in millions of our public funds to cage, cut up, and kill animals," says PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. "Whatever their stated goals, experiments on animals are about misery, pain, and death, and compassionate people don't want to support this—financially or in any other way."
The following are just two examples of the many experiments that are being conducted in Boston at a time when public sentiment against such cruelty and waste is growing:
- At MIT, experimenters sewed shut the eyelids of newborn mice, implanted electrodes in their brains, punctured their eyes, and injected drugs. They then killed the mice and cut out their brains.
- At Harvard, experimenters addicted monkeys to cocaine and amphetamine and then gave them a sleep-disorder drug to see how it affected cocaine use.
Pigs, mice, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, monkeys, and other animals used for experiments are confined to barren cages, where they are denied everything that is natural and important to them. Experimenters force-feed chemicals to animals, conduct repeated surgeries on them, implant wires in animals' brains, crush their spines, blind them, induce diseases, and much more.
The campaign is also targeting other heavily funded animal experimentation centers, including Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Los Angeles; Seattle; and Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit PETA.org.