For Speedy Launch:
November 13, 2023
Contact:
Kendall Davis 202-483-7382
Berkeley, Calif. – To encourage empathy for animals struggling in college laboratories, peta2, a part of PETA’s youth division, is visiting the College of California–Berkeley tomorrow with Abduction, a singular digital actuality expertise touchdown on faculty campuses throughout the nation. On this eerie expertise, guests will enter a mysterious truck containing a cell digital actuality studio. The scholars will seemingly discover themselves stranded within the desert with a few fellow people, kidnapped by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a stunning expertise, much like what animals endure in laboratories. They’ll watch as their pals are subjected to painful assessments—realizing that they’ll be subsequent.
When: Tuesday, November 14, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
The place: Dwinelle Plaza, College of California–Berkeley
Watch the trailer right here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction digital actuality expertise is obtainable upon request.
On the College of California–Berkeley, experimenters used mice who had been particularly bred to show signs of autism spectrum dysfunction, carving out a portion of their skulls so they might observe and manipulate their mind exercise. Experimenters implanted headposts on the mice and secured their particular person whiskers into separate tubes to check their sensitivity earlier than forcing the mice to carry out numerous duties in full darkness for 5 days per week. All of the mice had been killed and dissected.
In one other experiment, mice had been intentionally contaminated with tick-borne pathogens, that are recognized to trigger paralysis, extreme pores and skin lesions, facial swelling, and different signs. As soon as their illness development was deemed extreme sufficient, the mice had been killed by carbon dioxide asphyxiation and spinal dislocation.
Experimenters additionally subjected guinea pigs, who had been solely 2 weeks outdated, to expertise nearsightedness by inserting vision-distorting contact lenses of their eyes every day earlier than the younger animals had been killed.
“Many college students don’t know that on their very own faculty campuses, frightened and confused animals are being psychologically tormented, mutilated, and killed in laboratories, with no technique to escape and even perceive what’s taking place to them,” says Senior Director of peta2 Rachelle Owen. “peta2 is on a mission to open younger individuals’s eyes to this cruelty, assist college students perceive what it seems like, and encourage them to affix our name for a swap to superior, non-animal analysis.”
Research present that 90% of all fundamental analysis—most of which includes animals—fails to result in remedies for people, which is why the group is pushing universities to pivot to stylish, human-relevant analysis strategies.
Abduction—which was filmed in VR180 with help from the immersive content material creation studio Prosper XR—has stopped at almost 50 different faculty campuses over the previous yr, together with Harvard College, the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, the College of California–Los Angeles, and the College of Texas at Austin.
PETA—whose motto reads, partially, that “animals aren’t ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For extra data on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please go to PETA.org, hearken to The PETA Podcast, or comply with the group on X (previously Twitter), Fb, or Instagram.
