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Update (May 24, 2024): PROGRESS! Following our exposés and actions, Congress has slashed the budget of the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative by 40%. 🥳 This is what happens when you fund cruel and worthless experiments.
The good news comes after tens of thousands of our supporters joined us in urging the program to stop funding Harvard University’s cruel strobe experiments on baby monkeys and other horrors. 🛑 We also wrote to former President Barack Obama, who launched the BRAIN Initiative, telling him what his program was up to and asking him to take action on behalf of these baby monkeys. In March 2024, PETA flooded members of Congress with ads in several Washington, D.C., newspapers, letting them know that the BRAIN Initiative was funneling more than $2 million in tax money to monkey torture at Harvard. 🐒 😰
But we still need your help! We have to make sure that Harvard’s vision-warping experiments on newborn infant macaques are first on the BRAIN Initiative’s chopping block. If you haven’t already, please take action below now. 🚨
Original post:
PETA has learned that Harvard University experimenter Margaret Livingstone—who has sewn baby monkeys’ eyelids shut for up to a year—has somehow sunk even lower into the depths of cruelty. 😰 We need your help stopping her before more monkeys suffer! 🐒 ❤️
In her latest test, Livingstone snatches newborn monkeys from their mothers and forces them to wear goggles that create an unrelenting and disorienting strobe effect. 😡 Imagine constantly seeing this effect—like the ones at shows and clubs—for the first year and a half of your life. This is the reality for the baby monkeys trapped in her lab. 😱
PETA is urging the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—which is funding these and other tests by Livingstone rn with more than $2 million in taxpayer money—to pull the plug immediately. 🤯 💸 We’re also asking former President Barack Obama, whose administration launched the BRAIN Initiative, to intervene.
But we can’t do it without your help. 💪
Goggles of Gloom
Livingstone proudly gave disturbing deets of her new experiment at a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting. After ripping the baby monkeys away from their mothers, she forces them to wear helmets and goggles with built-in shutters that keep blocking their vision. The shutters rapidly open and close, repeatedly plunging the babies into darkness. 😢
The goggles create an effect like a strobe light. The baby monkeys see only 0.2 seconds of light every second, followed by 0.8 seconds of darkness. Over and over. For up to a year and a half. 😨 Why tf would anyone support this torture?
Once experimenters are satisfied with their torment, they conduct more tests on the monkeys to determine the extent of their brain damage.
Deranged and Unhinged
Livingstone has made a 40-year career of tormenting baby monkeys. In other experiments at Harvard, she’s abducted newborn monkeys from their mothers (yet again) and sewn their eyes shut to see how badly she could damage their brain and visual development. 😤
Hey Marge, what did baby monkeys ever do to you? 🤷
Livingstone seems to get experiment inspo from the nightmarish work of Harry Harlow, who invented a torture device that he called the “pit of despair,” designed to plunge motherless monkeys into depression as quickly and efficiently as possible. Her goggles of gloom would make him—and no one else—proud.
Not a Flicker of Relevance
Livingstone’s latest experiment allegedly studies how early life experiences change brain and visual development. But since her experiment can’t begin to mimic complex real situations for humans, this torment just harms monkeys and wastes taxpayer dollars. 🤦
Baby monkeys don’t deserve this torment at all—please urge NIH’s BRAIN Initiative to stop funding these pointless experiments!