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PETA Brings VR Experience Of First Person Animal Experiment Encounters To Yale University

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
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New Haven, Conn. – In a bid to encourage empathy for animals who are mutilated and killed in university laboratories, on Monday PETA will have its Yale University launch of Abduction, a unique virtual reality experience that will land on college campuses across the country.
In the eerie experience, visitors will enter a mysterious truck and put on a virtual reality headset. They’ll seemingly find themselves stranded in the desert with a couple of fellow humans, abducted by aliens, taken aboard a spaceship, and subjected to a terrifying experience similar to what animals endure in laboratories.
They’ll watch as others are subjected to experiments—inspired by real tests done on animals—knowing that they’ll be next.
Occurring between October 24–28, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. At the intersection of York Street and Alexander Walk, near Yale Law School, New HavenWatch the trailer here.At Yale, experimenters subject infant monkeys to “early life adversity”—including permanently removing babies from their mothers—to then study how it affects the animals’ behavior and social ranking.

Other experimenters subject monkeys to brain surgeries in which they carve out a portion of the skull to implant instrumentation so that they can hold the monkeys’ heads stock-still for tests. Then they inject neurotoxins into the monkeys’ brains to inflict permanent and devastating brain damage.

“Many students don’t know that on their own college campuses, frightened and confused animals are being tormented, mutilated, and killed in cold, barren laboratories, with no way to escape or even understand what’s happening to them,” says PETA Senior Director Rachelle Owen. “PETA is on a mission to open young people’s eyes to this cruelty, help them understand what it feels like, and motivate them to join our call for a switch to superior, non-animal research.”

Studies show that 90% of all basic research—most of which involves animals—fails to lead to treatments for humans, which is part of why PETA is pushing universities to pivot to sophisticated, human-relevant research methods.

Abduction—which was filmed in VR180 with assistance from the virtual reality creation studio Prosper XR—will stop at several other college campuses from coast to coast, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to experiment on”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information on PETA’s investigative newsgathering and reporting, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram

Banner Image: Monkey in cage.  Image Credit – PETA


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People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is the largest animal rights organization in the world, and PETA entities have more than 9 million members and supporters globally. PETA opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: in laboratories, in the food industry, in the clothing trade, and in the entertainment business. We also work on a variety of other issues, including the cruel killing of rodents, birds, and other animals who are often considered “pests” as well as cruelty to domesticated animals. PETA works through public education, investigative newsgathering and reporting, research, animal rescue, legislation, special events, celebrity involvement, and protest campaigns.