Experiments Conducted at UNC and Duke Are Inexcusable, Group Says
For Immediate Release:
April 12, 2011
Contact:
Robbyn Brooks 202-483-7382
Raleigh, N.C. — 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 Raleigh-Durham is a prime target. Why? Because more than $800 million dollars of public money went to the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and Duke University in 2010 alone. 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 concentrate the ads in the vicinities of both schools and will expand to other cities in 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 three examples of the many experiments that are being conducted at UNC and Duke at a time when public sentiment against such cruelty is growing:
- At UNC, experimenters fractured baby rabbits' noses and implanted plates and screws in four different places on the rabbits' faces.
- At Duke, pigs are killed, and their hearts are transplanted into baboons, even though these cruel experiments have never been successful.
- Also at Duke, rats have holes drilled into their skulls, are immobilized in restraining devices, and are injected with cocaine. Then their brains are zapped with electricity via implanted electrodes.
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.
PETA's ads were placed in the Raleigh-Durham region by Blue Line Media. The campaign is also targeting other animal research centers, including Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit PETA.org.