Owls' Skulls Cut Open at Johns Hopkins: Take Action Now!

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Update: March 17, 2020

PETA has fired off a letter to Johns Hopkins University (JHU) today and released damning reports and photographs obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that reveal the extent to which animals imprisoned in the university's laboratories suffer as a result of negligence, incompetence, and a stunning disregard for their lives.

JHU's violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act include locking highly social monkeys in solitary, barren cages with no enrichment as well as a number of horrific deaths endured by animals imprisoned at the school. In one instance, a worker closed a cage door on a marmoset monkey, killing the animal. In another, a monkey was found dead with her head stuck inside a ball used for "enrichment."

What's more, in light of its campus shutdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, JHU has ordered its experimenters to identify "critical animals to be maintained," presumably leading to the mass killing of countless others who aren't considered "critical"—which begs the question Why were these animals forced to endure cruel and painful tests in the first place?

Now more than ever, it's imperative that Shreesh Mysore's laboratory be shut down so that the owls imprisoned in it can be sent to a sanctuary. Please take action below to help.

It's a basement torture chamber.

Documents obtained by PETA reveal that Johns Hopkins experimenter Shreesh Mysore cuts into the skulls of barn owls, inserts electrodes into their brains, forces them to look at screens for hours a day, and bombards them with noises and lights—and pretends that doing this will tell us something about attention-deficit disorder in humans.



This owl is one of many imprisoned in Shreesh Mysore's 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.

Funded by Johns Hopkins University with more than $1 million, Mysore intends to use 50 to 60 barn owls in just the current set of painful experiments. He's also received more than $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health to torment these owls and other animals.

Six owls are just for his students to practice surgery on and then kill.

What He Does to Owls

Mysore cuts into owls' skulls to expose their brains. Then, he screws and glues metal devices onto their heads. The owls endure two to three invasive surgeries before Mysore uses them in experiments. These birds—who are nocturnal hunters who would fly great distances in their natural habitat—are forced into restraint devices so cramped that they can't move their wings while Mysore bombards them with sounds and lights and measures their brain activity. For some experiments, he restrains fully conscious owls for up to 12 hours. During these experiments, he pokes electrodes around in the brains of the fully conscious birds, mutilating their brain tissue so severely that they become "unusable" to him—at which point he kills them.

Mysore admits that his experiments are painful for the owls, yet in his grant application for the experiments, he provides scant information on any pain medication that would be administered.

All the owls are killed at the end of the experiments.

Mysore claims that his experiments could help humans, but owls have well-developed auditory and visual systems that are specialized in target selection (unlike humans). Bombarding these animals with artificial stimulation while their brain activity is measured in a distressing and completely unnatural situation does nothing to further understanding of human attention-deficit disorder.

Tell Johns Hopkins University to end this torment now!

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