Academy Award nominee and longtime PETA activist James Cromwell was arrested Thursday morning after interrupting a University of Wisconsin (UW) Board of Regents meeting to demand an end to cruel and deadly brain experiments on scores of cats at UW-Madison.
Shouting “Shame on UW for mutilating and killing cats!” and holding graphic blown-up photos showing how UW drilled into, deafened, and decapitated a cat named Double Trouble, Cromwell and PETA supporters were surrounded by university police and taken out of the building. Video of the event will be available shortly.
“The University of Wisconsin may think that grant money matters more than animals’ suffering, but the public who unwittingly funds this cruelty demands an end to these hideous experiments,” says Cromwell. “My friends at PETA and I will continue to call on UW-Madison to stop cutting into and killing cats in this useless experiment.”
Thursday’s protest follows a January 22 letter sent by PETA to the UW Board of Regents describing the abuse of nine other cats in the same laboratory where Double Trouble was experimented on and killed, as documented by UW’s own records. PETA asked the regents for an immediate end to the cruel experiments but received no response.
Double Trouble and other cats developed bacterial infections from the traumatic head and eye wounds inflicted on them, were starved for days at a time, and had their heads mutilated and stainless-steel posts screwed to their skulls. They were deafened and forced to work for small bits of food. Double Trouble was killed and decapitated. Some of the other cats may still be alive in a UW laboratory.
More than $3 million in federal funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been wasted on this ongoing project, even though leading clinicians in the field have never cited the published study as contributing to improving human hearing. More than 200,000 people have used PETA’s website to ask the NIH to cut funding for these experiments.
For more information, please visit PETA.org/DoubleTrouble.
Source: PETA
