For immediate release:
November 9, 2022
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Philadelphia – To encourage empathy for animals being maimed and killed in university labs, PETA will launch its University of Pennsylvania (Penn) Thursday kidnapping– a unique virtual reality experience that will land on college campuses across the country. In the spooky experience, visitors enter a mysterious truck and don a virtual reality headset. They are seemingly stranded in the desert with a few fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a terrifying experience similar to that endured by animals in laboratories. You’ll watch others undergo experiments – inspired by real animal experiments – and know they’ll be next.
When: Thursday and Friday, November 10 and 11, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m
Where: Woodland Walk, 3405 Walnut St. (at the intersection with S. 36th Street), Philly
Watch the trailer here. Broadcast quality footage kidnapping Virtual reality experience is available upon request. Pictures from the first day of Penn kidnapping Stop will be available on Thursday.
At Penn, experimenters injected young monkeys and piglets over a 10-minute period with a protein that caused severe toxicity in the animals. The monkeys showed symptoms of shock: bleeding, difficulty breathing, dilated pupils, liver failure, hypothermia, pale mucous membranes and abdominal fluid. And the piglets lost control of their muscles, severely affecting their ability to walk. The experimenters then killed all the animals.
A Penn experimenter left the university amid an investigation into his experiments involving brain-shattering piglets. First he drilled a hole in the skulls of these babies. He then used a top hat to pound their exposed brains before mutilating and killing the delicate piglets. This isn’t the first time Penn experimenters have smashed the brains of animals. Baboons, cats and rats were also subjected to head injuries in the school’s laboratories.
“A lot of students don’t realize that on their own college campus, terrified and confused animals are being tortured, maimed and killed in cold, barren labs with no escape or even understanding what’s happening to them,” says PETA Senior Director Rachelle owen “PETA is dedicated to opening young people’s eyes to this cruelty, helping them understand what it feels like, and motivating them to join our call for a shift towards superior, cruelty-free research.”
Studies show that 90% of all basic research – most of which involves animals – does not lead to treatments for humans, which is why PETA is urging universities to turn to sophisticated research methods relevant to humans.
kidnapping— which was shot in VR180 with the assistance of virtual reality creation studio Prosper XR — has made stops at several other college campuses from coast to coast, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Broadcast quality footage kidnapping Virtual reality experience is available upon request.
PETA – whose motto is partly that “animals aren’t ours to experiment with” – opposes speciesism, a worldview dominated by humans. For more information on PETA’s investigative news gathering and reporting, visit PETA.org or continue to follow the group Twitter, Facebookor Instagram.
