PETA Calls On Party Leaders to Cut Spending on Silly Animal Tests in Light of New Video From Inside Oregon Laboratory
For Immediate Release:
August 3, 2011
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
Washington — As Congress continues to debate what to cut from the U.S. budget, PETA has a bipartisan solution for the Obama administration to save the government more than $16 billion per year: Cut public funding for unethical and wasteful animal experiments.
To help make its case, PETA has released recently obtained, never-before-seen video footage from a federally funded laboratory at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC), where infant monkeys are terrorized with Mr. Potato Head dolls—whose large eyes naturally scare the babies—to see if the offspring of monkeys who were fed high-fat diets while pregnant are more scared of the dolls. Other fetal monkeys are cut from their pregnant mothers' wombs and have their brains dissected. ONPRC experimenter Kevin Grove, glowingly profiled in the New York Times and on ABC's Nightline, has received more than $8 million in taxpayer money from the National Institutes of Health—including nearly $100,000 in support from the Obama stimulus package—for the ongoing project.
"Spending millions in public money to terrify infant monkeys with Mr. Potato Head dolls is ethically, scientifically, and financially indefensible," says PETA Vice President of Laboratory Investigations Kathy Guillermo. "Wasteful spending on cruel and stupid animal experiments like this one drains much-needed resources from our already overburdened economy and health-care system."
PETA is asking members of Congress John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Mitch McConnell—charged with creating the 12-member Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction―to ensure that this and other wasteful animal experiments are put on the chopping block. PETA has also written to several members of Congress—including Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.)―who have been critical of the government's funding of useless research, in order to ask for their support.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.