As Congress deliberates the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) budget bill for next year, every single member will receive a video message starring Bob Barker — but it’s no The Price Is Right retrospective.
In a new video for PETA, the 91-year-old television icon calls for an end to NIH’s expensive, much-criticized maternal-deprivation experiments on infant monkeys.
“At this government facility in Maryland, hundreds of baby monkeys are torn from their mothers,” Barker explains in the video, which goes on to reveal how experimenters subject the baby monkeys to years of experiments designed to cause, worsen, and measure their severe fear, depression, and anxiety. These experiments have never led to the development of treatments for human mental illness, but they’ve continued for more than 30 years, costing taxpayers more than $30 million in just the past seven years alone.
“This project is approved to continue until 2017, but it needs to stop right now,” Barker concludes in the video. “Please be a champion for animals, taxpayers, and public health by acting now to help end the NIH’s abusive and wasteful experiments on baby monkeys.”
In December, compassionate members of Congress called on NIH to conduct a thorough scientific and ethical review of the cruel experiments. In January, U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard and Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell co-hosted PETA’s standing-room-only congressional briefing on the cruelty of the experiments, their inapplicability to human health, and the superior non-animal research methods available to study mental illness. PETA has also enlisted the support of scientists such as Dr. Jane Goodall, celebrity psychotherapist Dr. Jenn Berman, conservative strategist Mary Matalin, members of Congress, and hundreds of thousands of citizens.
For more information, please visit PETA.org/NIHChildAbuse.
