Experimenter scrambles owls' brains while they're still awake.

 
 
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Dear Friend,

In a secretive basement laboratory, an experimenter cuts into barn owls' skulls to expose their brains and attaches a metal device to their heads.

Then, they're crammed—fully conscious and wide awake—into a kind of straitjacket. The experimenter clamps their eyes open and bombards them with loud and distressing sights or sounds for as long as 16 hours while poking around in their brains. They writhe and struggle, becoming increasingly desperate to escape.

Eventually, their brain tissue is so severely damaged that they're deemed "unusable" and killed.

Unlike humans, barn owls don't experience attention deficit disorder (ADD). Yet Johns Hopkins University experimenter Shreesh Mysore is receiving millions of dollars—much of it from U.S. taxpayers—to torture these highly sensitive birds in sadistic, curiosity-driven tests, which he ludicrously claims will help him study ADD in humans.

Mysore has admitted that these experiments are painful, yet he's failed to reveal whether the owls receive any pain medication or care after repeated invasive procedures. He even keeps some birds for inexperienced staff to practice surgeries on—while other imprisoned owls are forced to breed and produce the next generation of victims.

Mysore's hideously cruel experiments are a tremendous waste of federal dollars and animals' lives—and owls aren't the only ones suffering.

Mysore is also electroshocking mice, severely dehydrating them, and forcing them to learn to press certain levers for water "rewards" (in reality, the amount that they need just to stay alive!) or subjecting them to bright lights as punishment for "incorrect answers." It's unclear what he's even attempting to observe in this taxpayer-funded torture.

Owls, mice, and other animals can't cry foul on these vile tests—but PETA can. And our success in ending all animal experiments hinges on support from people like you, Friend. Please pitch in while this special matching-gift challenge is still active—our deadline is almost here!

From giant pharmaceutical companies and the biggest names in the food and beverage industry to entire government agencies, PETA's determined team of scientists and researchers is stopping every category of cruel experiments on animals. That same determination is ending many experiments like Mysore's, too—keeping experimenters at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from cutting into cats' heads, deafening, and killing them and derailing the government gravy train that funded pointless and gruesome experiments on mice at the University of Pittsburgh. PETA has stopped painful decompression studies on sheep and starvation experiments on birds and shut down a government-funded baby-monkey psychological testing laboratory—and that's only scratching the surface of all that we're accomplishing with your help.

We won't rest until we win for the owls and mice trapped in Johns Hopkins' basement of horrors—and the many other animals enduring torment and utter misery in laboratories. Are you with us?

Thank you for your compassion.

Kind regards,

Ingrid E. Newkirk
President