Wearing owl masks and blasting audio recordings of screeching owls taken inside a Johns Hopkins University laboratory, a group of PETA supporters gathered outside the office of Johns Hopkins experimenter Shreesh Mysore and called for an end to his abuse of owls.

Mysore cuts into barn owls’ skulls to expose their brains, screws and glues metal devices to their heads, forces them into plastic tubes so cramped that they can’t even move their wings, keeps them there for up to 16 hours, clamps their eyes open, and bombards them with sounds and lights.

He pokes electrodes around in the brains of fully conscious birds, mutilating their brain tissue so severely that the animals become “unusable” to him—at which point he kills them.

This owl is one of many imprisoned in Shreesh Mysore’s basement laboratory, where he cuts into their skulls and screws metal devices onto their heads in curiosity-driven experiments that have no relevance for human health.

He claims to be studying human attention deficit disorder (ADD), even though barn owls don’t suffer from the condition and their auditory and visual systems differ vastly from those of humans.

“Cutting open barn owls’ heads won’t help humans with ADD,” says PETA neuroscientist and former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow Dr. Katherine Roe.

“PETA is calling on Johns Hopkins to stop pouring money into cruel experiments that contribute nothing to treatments for humans.”

Mysore has received more than $1 million in funding from the university and $1.3 million from the National Institutes of Health. Let’s get these gruesome experiments ended today.

Please sign the petition:

Johns Hopkins, Stop the Owl Experiments

This article was first published by PETA.org on 26 June 2019.