For Fast Launch:
March 7, 2024
Contact:
Tasgola Bruner 202-483-7382
Austin, Texas – To encourage empathy for animals struggling in college laboratories, peta2—a part of PETA’s youth division—is visiting the College of Texas at Austin at the moment and tomorrow with Abduction, an award-winning digital actuality expertise touchdown on school campuses throughout the nation. On this eerie expertise, guests will enter a mysterious truck containing a cellular 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 buddies are subjected to painful exams—realizing that they’ll be subsequent.
When: Thursday, March 7, and Friday, March 8, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
The place: Winship Circle Amplified Sound Space, UT-Austin, Austin
Watch the trailer right here. Broadcast-quality footage of the Abduction digital actuality expertise is out there upon request.
Experiments at UT-Austin have included subjecting rats to alcohol binges so as to trigger mind injury and trapping starved rats in chambers that delivered shocks to their ft. Experimenters additionally compelled mice to devour alcohol for 20 days, locked them in chambers crammed with ethanol vapors, repeatedly took blood from their tails, then killed them and reduce off their heads. Different experimenters reduce open frogs’ skulls to reveal their brains, immobilized them, mounted them on a foam tray whereas nonetheless alive, and subjected them to loud noises. Experimenters additionally surgically implanted recording units in marmosets’ brains, then compelled them to run on a wheel whereas viewing totally different photos on a display and “rewarded” them with drops of juice.
Federal inspectors discovered that resulting from laboratory workers negligence, a monkey was given insufficient ache aid, a marmoset sustained accidents as a result of a cage hadn’t been correctly secured, and a vole was improperly euthanized and located alive, possible in a pile of lifeless our bodies.
“Many college students don’t know that on their very own school campuses, frightened and confused animals are being psychologically tormented, mutilated, and killed in laboratories, with no solution to escape and even perceive what’s taking place to them,” says peta2 Senior Director Rachelle Owen. “peta2 is on a mission to open younger folks’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 primary analysis—most of which entails animals—fails to result in remedies for people, which is why peta2 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 practically 50 different school campuses over the previous yr, together with Harvard College, the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, and the College of California–Los Angeles. Abduction gained Gold and Viewers honors on the 2023 Shorty Affect Awards.
peta2—whose motto reads, partially, that “animals usually are not ours to experiment on”—helps younger folks make significant adjustments for animals of their on a regular basis lives. For extra data, please go to peta2.org or comply with the group on TikTok or Instagram.
